Redefining the university

Steven Holl’s new hall of residence at MIT is a landmark for contemporary American architecture. Yehuda Safran assesses his achievement and Carlo Ratti looks at the campus. Photography by Michael Moran.

The words used a couple of years ago by MIT President Charles Vest to launch one of the most ambitious building programmes in the university’s history were borrowed from Winston Churchill: ‘We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us’. The quality of architecture, he said, is crucial to a university if it is to stay competitive, continuing to attract the best students and staff.

The belief is widely shared in American academic circles competing for endowments and research funds. But getting them to agree about what ‘architectural quality’ means is rather more difficult. Many American universities are to this day administering architecture in the neo-Gothic or neo-Georgian style. Princeton, for example, has just started work on a 25,000-square-metre pseudo-medieval complex complete with stone walls and pitched slate roofs. The case of MIT is different; it has a history of working with the avant-garde. And more recently, Bill Mitchell, its outgoing dean of architecture and planning, has approached some of the world’s leading architects to take part in a $1 billion campus expansion. Steven Holl, Frank Gehry, Kevin Roche, Fumihiko Maki and Charles Correa are all working at MIT.

The most important of the works completed to date is certainly Simmons Hall, designed by Steven Holl Architects in collaboration with Perry Dean Rogers and Partners. This large, perforated building, somewhat like a gutted fractal sponge, faces Vassar Street and establishes a new landmark in the frayed urban landscape west of the campus.

Also now being built on Vassar Street, but at the opposite end of the campus, is the Stata Center, a large research institute that will house MIT’s departments of information technology, artificial intelligence and linguistics. Its design took Frank Gehry, in association with Cannon Design, about two years to complete. The building remodels the campus’s north front and the subway station. Also, with the help of various demolitions, it has opened a new visual corridor focussed on the courtly neoclassical cupola at the centre of MIT. The structure comprises two massive brick towers set in a regular geometry, representing the building’s dual minds: one strictly concerned with computer science and the other with linguistics and philosophy. Between these rise a series of freeform volumes, clad in aluminium and stainless steel. The impression conveyed is that of a regular plan on which mutant elements have grown. Some of these seem to detach themselves, to pirouette and crash to earth on either side.

Another major construction site is situated at the centre of the campus, on the aristocratic quadrilateral of 20th-century architecture where the works of Alvar Aalto (the historic curvilinear halls of Baker House, 1949), Eero Saarinen (the chapel and auditorium, 1955) and Eduardo Catalano (the student centre, 1965) face one another. To take up the task of fitting a new sports facility into such a sensitive context, the university brought in Kevin Roche, who had collaborated with Saarinen himself on this very site. The recently inaugurated building sits discreetly in its context, thanks to a slightly curved glass-and-stone facade that takes up in masterly fashion the threads of its neighbours. The interior is perhaps less satisfactory, but it had to contend with an extraordinarily complicated functional programme as well as with external site restraints.

The last major projects that will mark the MIT campus in the coming decades are still only on paper: the Media Lab extension and the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Project. The first is a very precise and elegant work by Fumihiko Maki that will stand next to the existing Media Lab building, designed by I. M. Pei in 1985. Its regular, rectangular form can be broken down internally into a series of interlocking duplex spaces overlooking a large and brightly lit central atrium. The second project, designed by Goody, Clancy and Associates and Charles Correa Associates, should give MIT a new urban front facing the city of Cambridge. To achieve this, it will step over the railroad tracks and thus resolve one of the most awkward discontinuities entailed in the extension of the campus.

Any definitive judgement of MIT’s entire ambitious building scheme will have to wait until all the sites are completed in the near future. So far, however, one wonders what is it that these projects, designed by such diverse architects, have in common. Aside from their differences of form, can they be viewed as a harmonious whole? Part of the answer lies the radical organization shared by all the new buildings. Each architect was expressly briefed by MIT to integrate academic and social facilities as closely as possible, so as to encourage interaction between students and researchers in the various disciplines.

This occurs both in a residential structure like Simmons Hall (defined by Safran as ‘a social condenser in the true sense of the term’) and in a research outfit like the Stata Center, where the offices are arranged in independent subsets facing the double-height common spaces. The reason for these choices is simple. John Guttag, head of MIT’s electrical engineering and computer science department, explains: ‘In the past, people would bump into each other on the way to the library to do research, for example. Now everything can be done from a computer, so people aren’t leaving their offices and bumping each other as often’.

The second reflection is more general and falls outside the programmed affinities of each individual building. At times the genius loci of the MIT campus seems to have twisted the arms of its architects. None of them, in fact, is immune to the influences of that rough and industrial context, whose inspiring principle seems to be a pure logic of necessity. Buildings laid out according to a rigorous orthogonal grid and identified by alphanumeric initials (this writer’s office has the disquieting identification NE18-5FL) are linked by an ‘infinite corridor’, with a 3 x 4-metre section, that bores through the campus in a straight line more than 250 metres long. There is a bit of all this in the regular pattern on the front of Simmons Hall (reminiscent of a punched card, with its 5,500 square and coloured windows intended to proclaim its own structural logic – the colours chosen being a reference to the extent of structural stresses in each part); or in the Stata Center, an unusual building among those designed by Frank Gehry in recent years, with its two square brick ramparts dotted with traditional windows.

Also significant has been the close involvement of students and of the entire academic community in the different phases of the building operation. In some cases they have already been formally involved in the definition of the programme. In others they have taken part directly, by sending messages to mailing lists and discussion forums on the Internet. ‘Stata’s status’ is today a favourite topic of conversation on the campus. Never mind if judgements may at times be sharply conflicting. Gehry’s building in particular stirs fiercely opposing passions (described on the Web alternately as one of the new wonders of the campus, a worthy heir to Baker House, or as ‘a stack of soda cans that somebody sat on’): involvement by the academic community was precisely one of the desired effects. Says Mitchell, the strategist behind the whole project: ‘Any major institution should take risks and innovate in architecture. After all, architecture is not just about being liked, but about exploring new ideas’.