Armour Institute, one of IIT's predecessor institutions, was founded in 1890 just as Chicago was emerging as a center for progressive architectural thought. Men like Burnham and Root, Sullivan and Adler, and William Le Baron Jenney were transforming the practice and developing an architectural vocabulary that emphasized structure and function over ornamentation. This generation of architects founded what became known as the first Chicago School of architecture. Mies van der Rohe founded the next. In 1936, when Earl Reed resigned as director of the Department of Architecture at Armour Institute, the school engaged Chicago's architectural leaders in the search for a new director. The search committee, headed by John Holabird, recruited Mies. Mies' first task was to "rationalize" the architecture curriculum.