In case anyone is interested here's some material from a Tech Review article about the archiecting and building of the new MIT campus which opened in 1916
The "New Tech"
The Cambridge campus was--and is--a marvel.
Friday, September 8, 2006
By Elizabeth Durant
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17435
Bosworth accepted the premise of a building that unified MIT's academic departments. He even used some of Freeman's ideas for the main building: the central corridor, concrete frame, and large windows. But he mixed a modern interior with a classical exterior. "MIT saw itself as a powerful institution, not as just some factory sitting in the backwater of Cambridge," Jarzombek says. "It wanted to have a huge physical and symbolic presence, so the classical dressing was very appropriate."
The campus was a triumph of engineering. The ground beneath it consisted of fill (largely mud from the Charles River and earth from subway excavations), so 22,000 piles were driven down to a more stable layer of glacial deposits. The sheer size of the main building (now Buildings 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, and 10) presented another challenge, Jarzombek says. At the time, it was "the largest single unified building in the United States," he notes, and the first private building at this scale made of concrete. Technology Review reported in 1914 that "the making of the cement was practically a continuous process, the chutes of the construction towers delivering without cessation a liquid lake of cement covering an acre at an operation." Once the foundation was in place, the building rose as a unit, almost one foot per day. Finally, the white limestone facade was added.
The Cambridge campus, which Maclaurin called a "great white city," was finished in 1916, at a cost of $7 million. Despite campus growth over the ensuing 90 years, Jarzombek writes, the main building remains remarkably unchanged, an icon "without equal in the American architectural context."
While the statue never was formally constructed -- it has been temporarily created as part of MIT's famous "hacks" -- most recently in 2009 -- though never of the intended scale and minus all of the mamery functions