Kendall/MIT Infill and Small Developments

shmessy said:
God bless anonymous personal attacks on the internet with no supporting details...........

If you have such a negative statement to smear about a person, it would be helpful to the reader to say why.
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ugh so stupid..... in response to people being healthy and doing dry January, the owner took the persecuted route, cried and urged everyone to think of the business owners. He must of forgot he sells something that hurts a huge amount of people daily. Scum.
 
Suffolk 83 said:
ugh so stupid..... in response to people being healthy and doing dry January, the owner took the persecuted route, cried and urged everyone to think of the business owners. He must of forgot he sells something that hurts a huge amount of people daily. Scum.
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That is a bizarre complaint on his part...are you sure he was 100% serious? It sounds like something someone would say tongue in cheek.
 
Suffolk 83 said:
ugh so stupid..... in response to people being healthy and doing dry January, the owner took the persecuted route, cried and urged everyone to think of the business owners. He must of forgot he sells something that hurts a huge amount of people daily. Scum.
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Thank you for letting us in on that. Yes, if he was serious, he sounds like a jerk.
 
tmac9wr said:
That is a bizarre complaint on his part...are you sure he was 100% serious? It sounds like something someone would say tongue in cheek.
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Not only was he serious, he quadrupled down on it and called me a troll for urging him to consider that people were doing something healthy for themselves. I used to be a huge fan of theirs, no longer.
 
Suffolk 83 said:
Not only was he serious, he quadrupled down on it and called me a troll for urging him to consider that people were doing something healthy for themselves. I used to be a huge fan of theirs, no longer.
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Damn, that's too bad...it's also incredibly unreasonable haha. That's it, I'm going to find a new brewery to drink in, and I'm going to get drunker than I've ever been in my entire life!

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tmac9wr said:
Damn, that's too bad...it's also incredibly unreasonable haha. That's it, I'm going to find a new brewery to drink in, and I'm going to get drunker than I've ever been in my entire life!
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Be sure to stumble over to Vitamin Sea after and explain to the owner how you intentionally avoided his establishment because he's a dick!
 
Blackbird said:
Be sure to stumble over to Vitamin Sea after and explain to the owner how you intentionally avoided his establishment because he's a dick!
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haha that or, to use another quote from the Simpsons episode in my last post, I can go just there and enjoy their great beer but order rudely: "Just give me another beer you brain dead hick!"
 
A perfect, crystal-clear explanation behind the most pertinent elements of the project from the Architects themselves:

The iconic Green Building’s contained simplicity, precise placement, and formal symmetry at first seem to resist alteration, especially by addition. Yet engaging these very qualities offers opportunities for intervention and interpretation, inspiring possibilities beyond the boundaries of this pivotal structure on the MIT campus.

Building 55’s program calls for a gateway that showcases earth, environmental, and climate science education, and attracts members of the MIT community and beyond. To fulfill its role as an interdisciplinary hub, its architectural strategy demonstrates resilience and sustainability, and embodies a clear and compelling identity of its own while contributing to the identity of the larger campus.
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A newly planted grove of trees leads visitors to enter a ground level bound by glass walls that maintain visual connections to campus, the Charles River, and the City of Boston. Jointly programmed by the three academic departments sharing the space, it features art commissioned specifically for the addition. Above, classrooms and conference rooms give onto the first floor’s double height space and lead to a newly renovated lecture hall. Building 55 will engage the MIT community around a dynamic expression of the earth, environmental, and climate sciences.
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If anyone has been keeping up with the uprising of trads on Twitter/X, it's writing and design like this that enhance their arguments against "today's-architects-who-love-to-instill-their-Modernist-values-that-hate-human-beings-on-everyone-else" trope. Quite infuriating.

This design seems like a moderately lazy excuse to avoid having an awkward set of openings on the facade, likely due to dealing with some awkward floor plans and adjustments to the rest of the building. They're also trying to integrate earth, environmental, and climate sciences departments (so the design brief probably asks for sustainable/timber materials) into a building built entirely out of concrete. I can think of ways it could have been done better, but just trying to rationalize how they got here.

I think my biggest critique is that they argue this harmonizes with the rest of the building by playing off of it's symmetry, precision, and simplicity. If that were the case, this thing would be a lot more simpler in appearance, and not wrap the entire addition in a transparent second skin held together by hundreds of parts, adding a sense of complexity as well as contradiction to the concrete structure.

The original render had the supports having significantly less visual impact. Hopefully that will be the case when it's fully cladded?
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I'm also hoping this at least looks cool at night....?
 
As of 8/6/23
 

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As of 8/6/23. Looks better in person.
 

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