 At the time, Mies was an architecture professor at and the principal designer of buildings for the Illinois Institute of Technology.Mies had taken on sporadic projects outside of academic life, such as the Seagram's Building in Manhattan and 860-880 Lakeshore Drive in Chicago.Mies brought in Ludwig Hilberseimer and Alfred Caldwell, two of his associates at IIT, to serve as site planner and landscape architect, respectively.