MIT East Campus - Kendall Square Gateway | Cambridge

bigpicture7 said:
Eastgate is getting torn down. Get ready to see a 30-story tower demolished - not a sight you see everyday. An inside source tells me that the "impossibility" of upgrading essential systems is part of what did her in...a kitchen fire on the top floor a few years ago was very difficult to extinguish. And the building as a whole is very inefficient compared to what will replace it.
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Impossibility seems like hyperbole. Not cost effective compared with demolition/new construction is more like it.
 
tangent said:
Impossibility seems like hyperbole. Not cost effective compared with demolition/new construction is more like it.
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Tangent -- a bit of me will go with the demise of the Eastgate Tower -- just like some of me went with the demise of Bldg 20.

Back when I was a poor grad student in the late 1970's, I needed someplace for a honeymoon just after I got married. A friend loaned me her apartment on the 26th floor -- She was going to spend the Christmas to early January period in the Bahamas with her folks -- so it was available.

She had two windows facing the river and the Longfellow Bridge -- One of the best views in the city even then.
 
Demolition has started on the two buildings on Carlton Street. I have a pretty good view of this site a couple days a week - it's a pretty impressive constitution zone at this point. For the photographers (if only I could just upload pics directly to aB, I'd put up some myself), the medical building has a conference room on the third floor is often empty and has a good view of the site...
 
FK4 said:
.......For the photographers (if only I could just upload pics directly to aB, I'd put up some myself), the medical building has a conference room on the third floor is often empty and has a good view of the site...
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Flickr is free and easy. I switched over after years of getting ripped off by Photobucket and recommend it for anybody who wants to contribute here. The images also look better than on Photobucket, and it allows more options for sharing different sizes.
 
FK4 said:
Demolition has started on the two buildings on Carlton Street. I have a pretty good view of this site a couple days a week - it's a pretty impressive constitution zone at this point. For the photographers (if only I could just upload pics directly to aB, I'd put up some myself), the medical building has a conference room on the third floor is often empty and has a good view of the site...
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I'd recommend Imgur - no requirement to create an account and it's free. Just go the imgur.com, ignore the memes, and click upload and then link to the direct image URL. Easy as pie.
 
Hopefully, those power poles will be taken down as well.
 
Planning Board deals sharp rebuke to MIT over cantilevered ‘SoMA’ building proposal

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology presented the second of its new South of Main – “SoMa” – buildings to the Planning Board for design review Tuesday, a commercial laboratory building cantilevered above and incorporating the Kendall Clock Tower Building at 238 Main St., and got sharp criticism from almost the entire board. MIT wants to start construction soon, but it will have to regroup and return to the board.
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http://www.cambridgeday.com/2017/03...mit-over-cantilevered-soma-building-proposal/
 
Can we as a nation present a complete list of everything MIT is building?

Lists help me to see the big picture.

But i'm at a loss as to where you get the event program.

Most of all, is MIT gonna build any tall shit?

And where the fuck are the Cambridge Nimby's in all of this?
 
odurandina said:
Can we as a nation present a complete list of everything MIT is building?

Lists help me to see the big picture.

But i'm at a loss as to where you get the event program.

Most of all, is MIT gonna build any tall shit?

And where the fuck are the Cambridge Nimby's in all of this?
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This is a concise list:
http://kendallsquare.mit.edu/updates/architectural-teams-selected-kendall-square-work

Capital projects site:
http://capitalprojects.mit.edu/projects/kendall-square-initiative


SitePlan-01_crp.jpg
 
The CambridgeDay article makes the Planning Board sound pretty thoughtful here, and they're right. MIT's architects have done an awful job on this project so far. Every one of the buildings is ugly (one could argue that every building at MIT is ugly save Killian Court, but whatever...) Glad someone is putting a foot down.

One small issue... I agree that the Phillips Exeter Academy Library is great - on the inside. On the outside, not so much:

Exeter_library.jpg
 
^^thanks! i think the buildings will function quite well, save energy, etc. But, MIT isn't knocking anyone out on design. *Perhaps (for Whiggy too), the disconnect between our storied institution vs these turd designs, became more of a cross than he could bear.
 
Why is MIT building a 1500 car lot? It's bad enough to build garages in the seaport, Kendall even moreso.
 
curcuas said:
Why is MIT building a 1500 car lot? It's bad enough to build garages in the seaport, Kendall even moreso.
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What's the net change with this project? It eliminates all the surface parking lots in the area.
 
^ I am pretty sure MIT will have a net loss of parking spaces over the course of the next 10 years. They are replacing West Garage with a dorm in addition to this project. As discussed earlier on this thread, MIT launched a large campaign to get employees to take alternate means of transit, including fully subsidized T passes and 60% subsidized commuter rail passes.

http://news.mit.edu/2016/access-mit-program-offers-free-public-transit-to-mit-employees-0614

Becoming a living lab to change commuter behavior

Over the past seven years, the MIT Transit Lab, in collaboration with the Parking and Transportation Office, has focused on how faculty, staff, students, and visitors travel to and from MIT. One particular challenge was the total cost of building and/or maintaining parking spaces in and around the MIT campus — and whether this could be offset by improving commuter awareness of the problem and incentivizing new behavior.

In 2010 the Parking and Transportation Office, in conjunction with the Transit Lab, launched a pilot program called the MIT Mobility Pass. This represented an exciting, first-of-its-kind collaboration between MIT and the MBTA. The pilot involved approximately 1,000 MIT employees who typically parked on campus, and allowed these employees to access MBTA subways and local buses at no additional cost to them, providing new daily options for commuting to campus.

Based on the success of the pilot, MIT has decided to expand the program to include all benefits-eligible MIT faculty and staff at the Cambridge campus. By becoming a “living lab,” the research team believes that this program may represent a new model for managing commuter demand within densely populated areas.
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12345 said:
Planning Board deals sharp rebuke to MIT over cantilevered ‘SoMA’ building proposal



http://www.cambridgeday.com/2017/03...mit-over-cantilevered-soma-building-proposal/
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“I’m baffled because it’s still a diagram to me,” architect Tom Sieniewicz said. “I just don’t get it. I really don’t get it. I don’t understand what the proportional program is. I don’t understand the overall massing of it. I don’t understand why it belongs here.

“MIT’s got one chance to build Kendall Square – one chance to get it right. And if they don’t get it right the students will go to Stanford and they won’t come to MIT, and that would be terrible. We have to be really, really careful with each of these buildings.”

“This is a really, really, thoughtful, careful, extraordinary firm,” he said, referring to Perkins+Will. But it has produced a project where “I just don’t understand what I’m looking at. I’m deeply deeply puzzled by this.”

“I share Tom’s inability to understand and comment. I think I understand the first-story elevation from the renderings, and I think that’s fine,” said architect and board member Hugh Russell. “Yet I can see it’s going to work visually – if you’re trying to get something that’s absolutely featureless.”

“All of these buildings have puzzled me. I was pleased that the next building developed a palette of color, a scale to the curtain wall that you can relate to in some ways, even though it’s 27 stories tall. So I don’t know what to say about this. And I’ve been a practicing architect for almost 50 years,” Russell said.

Russell and Sieniewicz said the façade of the new building was featureless compared with the texture and scale of the historic clock tower building it abuts.

Chairman H Theodore Cohen, an attorney, continued the trend: “I have difficulty with the building too. I don’t quite understand the comment that it relates to 238 Main St. If the idea is that it’s a blank wall setting off 238, maybe that works? But I don’t see how the buildings relate to each other at all. I thought my not understanding was just my ignorance: that I was not an architect.”
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wish we heard this more.
 
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