Seeing clearly at MIT

By Matt Haviland

Buildings are all well and good. Some are purely functional, and others – like most of the buildings reviewed by Robert Campbell – have some interesting aesthetic touch or motif. However, except for those abandoned, buildings are defined by their residents. This is something usually untouched by architecture reviews, and certainly left out by pamphlets and encyclopedic descriptions, but it’s possibly the most important part of the equation: how do all these angles and measurements affect the people who spend time, even entire lives, working around them?

Of course a college like MIT would be the rare party responsible for thinking, “well, why not theme our new building around the scientists who are going to live there.” World famous Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki was happy to oblige. His new extension to MIT’s Media Lab in Cambridge is not only fascinating from an artistic and gut-level perspective, but serves many purposes to make sure that these lab rats can share their brilliance in a nearly Facebook-esque fashion.

Like hundreds of user profiles amassed on the same page, each one posting news or quoting Lil’ Wayne, every member of MIT’s Media Lab will be able to see multiple other groups at once. Due to nothing but transparent glass walls, you can stand in, say, the central atrium and “look into the labs of half a dozen research teams.” The underlying theory is that “most of the exciting work in science occurs at the boundaries between disciplines.” At the original Media Lab, people from different sciences (and even arts) congregated in “a nearly windowless box” to conduct their own separate research, while keeping their eyes open to the work going on around them. This way, the students were never at a loss for random outside inspiration.

The new building lets that theory virtually wash over it, bleeding away all visual boundaries between sciences. With different groups working in close proximity, thoroughly visible to each other (and if the glass wasn’t transparent enough, there are video screens too), the atmosphere is ripe for mixing ideas. In the building’s two atriums, “at whatever level you’re on, you’re at the bottom floor of some of the two-story labs and at the top floor of others.” Campbell observes that it “feels laced together with imaginary diagonals,” enhanced by “a boldly colored stair.” A person must feel almost naked, performing experiments in an environment so consciously striving to put you on display. No secrecy can be had here, and by the 90 million dollar price tag, some important people must consider absolute openness the way to go.

A courtyard designed by Richard Fleischner, various top-floor event rooms, and a roof terrace overlooking the Boston skyline round out the building. But as I was getting at before, these features mean nothing if people aren’t using them. For such a functional, aware building, they seem like afterthoughts. Not to say an extra room or two won’t be helpful when you have a scientific event to host, or that the courtyard wouldn’t be a nice place to stroll through on your way to the lab. Just that the rest of this building is stunningly assured of the fact that these people are here to congregate and these walls are here to not get in their way. Any extra touches are just pleasant frames.

At the same time, not every building can be so laser pointed towards a certain goal. Emerson College’s academic buildings, for example, are packed with different features that are useful only to those involved. A student might never set foot in the Walker Building’s study rooms if they already have a quiet place to work. There are floors in the Ansin Building that many of us will never even see. And some dramatic design feature like every wall being made of transparent glass just wouldn’t work for everyone.

The final analysis concludes that even though buildings should serve their inhabitants, there isn’t usually a practical way to make that happen. Unless it’s literally an extension to a laboratory at MIT, too many people are going to need too many different things from a given structure to make pointed design motifs the way to go. After all, most buildings are only necessary to keep us walled away from the streets and capped off from the sky. They are just enclosed spaces, after all, and if the MIT scientists really wanted openness between separate projects, they could have set up their labs in a field. But the fact that they got one of the world’s premiere architects to create a glass box specifically, creatively suited to their needs is cool, and for those who can use it, the new extension to MIT’s Media Lab should be a great habitat for all kinds of unexpected scientific breakthroughs.

The rest of us can live just as opaquely as usual.