MIT Expansion Plans | MIT/Kendall Square | Cambridge

Almost forgot about this thing... what's it again? A power plant?

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I don't know how I feel about MIT. They're building some good looking buildings....but they're BORING. Something is missing.
 
kz1000ps said:
First up, the Media Lab:

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FYI to all:

http://places.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=12908 said:
Open House: 3.5.2010
Conference: 3.6.2010

On Friday and Saturday March 5 and 6, MIT will officially open the new Media Lab Complex, designed by Pritzker Prize winner Fumihiko Maki, with a free public open house and a free public conference with the architect.

Described by the Globe?s Robert Campbell, with only wee exaggeration, as ?the world?s most exquisite building?, the complex marks a new era of innovation for the Media Lab and for a range of art, design and technology-related programs in the School of Architecture + Planning, of which the Media Lab is a part.
The Friday open house will take place from 2 ? 4PM and will be followed by a dedication ceremony at 4PM. Speakers at the ceremony will include:

Dana G. Mead, Chairman, MIT Corporation
Susan Hockfield, President, MIT
Ad?le Naud? Santos, Dean, School of Architecture + Planning
Fumihiko Maki, Principal Architect
Frank Moss, Director, MIT Media Laboratory
Mitchel Resnick, Academic Head, Program in Media Arts and Sciences
Karen Brennan, PhD Candidate (2012) in Media Arts and Sciences
Sajid Sadi, PhD Candidate (2010) in Media Arts and Sciences

The dedication will be followed on Saturday March 6 with a public conference from 9AM - 12:30PM, hosted by the School of Architecture + Planning and featuring Maki and members of his design team discussing the conception and design of the building.

The conference will also feature Nicholas Negroponte, William Mitchell, Frank Moss and other leaders of the Media Lab, providing a rare opportunity to learn more about the unique collaboration between architect and client. Members of the construction team will also be present to answer questions. Dean Ad?le Naud? Santos will present opening remarks.

All activities will take place in the new building at 75 Amherst Street on MIT?s Cambridge campus.
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Wish I could make it for this.
 
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Thanks. Can you link to whatever page you found that announcement on?
 
The screens look awful. Something between bug lamp and prison.
 
Described by the Globe?s Robert Campbell, with only wee exaggeration, as ?the world?s most exquisite building?,
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Campbell did actually write that:

Robert Campbell said:
Media Lab aims to elevate transparency
Brilliant design appears temptingly veiled, but allows researchers to peek

By Robert Campbell, Globe Correspondent | December 6, 2009

CAMBRIDGE - What happens when some of the world?s messiest occupants move into the world?s most exquisite building?

It should be a fascinating sight. The group of far-out MIT experimenters known as the Media Lab is in the process of expanding into a new building designed by one of the world?s great architects, Fumihiko Maki of Japan.

Maki is a master of delicacy, precision, and understatement. Almost everything in the new building?s interior is white. You sometimes feel, as daylight sifts through the translucent walls, that you?ve been caught in a magical snowstorm.

The Media Lab guys, by contrast, are used to living in a grandma?s attic. Their current quarters are piled high with the dark clutter of new or abandoned experiments, some of them seemingly nutty. Robots peer down at you from shelves. Coils snake around your feet. It?s just as exciting as the Maki but in a completely different way.

Frank Moss, the Media Lab?s director, puts it this way: ?It will take time to regain the sense of mess and to repopulate with junk.??

It?s the classic marriage of form and content. The new building is Snow White and the Media Lab is Mad Max. Time will reveal how well the marriage works.

That said, viewed simply and purely as a work of architecture, this is a wonderful building. You can think of it as an exercise in transparency. The Media Lab has long been famous for hiding itself in a building by I.M. Pei that was a nearly windowless box. The new building, which joins the Pei at one edge, is exactly the opposite. From outside, you can look all the way through it from one end to the other. It?s sheathed in shimmering glass and metal screens that allow about half the sunlight through to the interior. You feel that the building is temptingly veiled, not blanketed.

Transparency is the motif inside too. The guiding concept of the original Media Lab, defined years ago by MIT president Jerome Weisner and visionary professor Nicholas Negroponte, was that most of the exciting work in science occurs at the boundaries between disciplines. Weisner wanted to create a research setting where people from different backgrounds - not only sciences, but the arts - would bump into one another and sparks of creativity would fly.

?The first people were a salon des refuses,?? says Negroponte. ?They were the misfits who didn?t fit into the academic categories.??

The new building takes the transparency concept to an extreme. The goal is to make everyone?s work visible to everyone else. From the central atrium, you can look into the labs of half a dozen different research teams. Labs are wide open: Senior offices wrap around the top of a double-height shared space. They work like the ateliers of art schools, each with a master and a team of acolytes.

?Glass forces collaboration,?? says Moss. ?We?ll put very different groups near one another. And we?ll have video screens everywhere, too, so people can tune in on what others are doing.??

It?s in the atrium spaces - there are two - that the building really sings. You don?t notice, at first, that the labs surrounding them are subtly differentiated. 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. The result is that the atrium space itself feels laced together with imaginary diagonals. (A boldly colored stair repeats that motif.) It?s as spatially exciting as any modern building I know. But beyond that, it serves the purpose of teasing the researchers to explore and peek in everywhere.

There are other public spaces: an outdoor courtyard by Rhode Island artist Richard Fleischner and, at the building?s top, several event rooms and a roof terrace, all with breathtaking views of the Boston skyline. The final construction cost was $90 million.

Maki, 81, is the most influential Japanese architect of his generation. He studied architecture in the 1950s at Harvard and worked for a time for Cambridge architect Josep Lluis Sert before returning to Japan and starting his own firm. Always a modernist, usually working in glass, metal, and concrete, he enlivens his buildings with unexpected shapes and playful expressive touches. In 1993 he received architecture?s highest accolade for life achievement, the Pritzker Prize. He is currently the architect for the proposed Tower Four at the World Trade Center site in New York.

Why did the Media Lab choose Maki? ?He?s the architect?s architect,?? says Bill Mitchell. ?We knew he would do spaces powerful enough to preserve their integrity and clarity no matter what got put into them.??

Mitchell, who will be moving into the new building, is a former Media Lab director. He was also architectural adviser to former MIT president Charles Vest. In that role, he brought a series of internationally known architects to the campus for such buildings as the Stata Center by Frank Gehry, Simmons Hall by Steven Holl, and a neuroscience center by Charles Correa. It was a controversial effort to shake up MIT?s architecture and inject more invention, in much the same way that the Media Lab was an attempt to shake up and remix the disciplines of science. The era ended with the economic crash.

Negroponte remembers first seeing Maki?s proposed design on a visit to Tokyo. He thought the building looked too much like a box and said so. Maki replied: ?Yes, it?s a box on the outside, but it explodes inside.?? Indeed.

I?m sure the members of the Media Lab will soon transform the interiors of this delicate white-and-silver butterfly of a building into something more like the sweaty backstage of a rock concert. But maybe the impending collision of austere architect and brash researchers is the whole point. Mixing disciplines, after all, is the Media Lab?s mission.
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I got to see the inside of this thing.
 
Where ideas can flow

MIT?s Media Lab moves into $90 million building designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect
By Hiawatha Bray
Globe Staff / March 6, 2010

CAMBRIDGE - It took more than 10 years, but the Massachusetts Institute of Technology?s famed Media Lab has finally moved into its new digs.

The gleaming aluminum structure on Amherst Street in Cambridge officially opened yesterday. Media Lab director Frank Moss said its large central atrium and glass-enclosed laboratories are ideal spaces for the lab?s collaborative research projects.

?It delivers on the vision of a unique way of doing research,?? Moss said. ?No boundaries, no walls, a flow of interdisciplinary ideas, and plenty of space to build and invent.??

The new lab?s Pritzker Prize-winning architect, Fumihiko Maki, called it ?one of the best buildings we ever produced in my long career, both in Japan and in the United States.??

The plans for the new Media Lab were announced in 1999, as part of a major building campaign for the MIT campus. The most famous of the new buildings, a computer science center designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry, was completed in 2004. But Maki?s plans for the Media Lab were put in a drawer after the Internet boom of the late-1990s faded and corporate financing for the project dwindled.

Construction of the $90 million, 163,000-square-foot building finally began in July 2007. Alan Steinberg, project executive for the building?s general contractor, Bond Brothers of Everett, said it generally takes about 18 months to build a standard office building of that size. But the new Media Lab is far from standard. ?It?s a lot of intricacies, a lot of parts and pieces,?? Steinberg said.

For instance, Maki insisted on using custom-designed doorframes. His design includes dozens of electric winches mounted in the ceilings, each capable of lifting up to 1,000 pounds. This lets MIT researchers lift and suspend a wide variety of devices. But it required the use of extra steel girders to support the additional weight. Meanwhile, the building?s aluminum-clad exterior had to be painted a special shade of gray formulated by Maki himself. ?You can?t get this at Home Depot,?? Steinberg said.

Founded in 1985 by MIT architecture professor Nicholas Negroponte and former MIT president Jerome Wiesner, the Media Lab was originally housed next door to the new building, in a structure designed by another famous architect, I.M. Pei. The lab applies digital technologies to everyday problems in communications, media, and the arts. Sixty corporate sponsors fund Media Lab research, which the companies can apply to their products and services. The lab?s research is incorporated into a number of popular products, including music-based video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band and electronic book readers like Amazon.com's Kindle.

The building?s seven laboratories are already bustling with activity. A team led by composer Tod Machover was preparing a vast high-tech chandelier for the September premiere in Monaco of Machover?s new opera, ?Death and the Powers,?? about a man who uploads his consciousness into a machine. In another lab, researchers William Lark, Ryan Chin, and Michael Lin showed off their efforts to design a two-passenger electric car that can be folded to half its normal size when parked. Doctoral candidate Grant Elliott demonstrated research in ?biomechatronics,?? advanced prosthetic devices that use digital technology to help amputees walk normally and with less effort.

The Media Lab won?t have the building to itself. Although the Media Lab is the lead tenant, MIT?s school of architecture will share the facility. But Media Lab researchers will still have lots of space. They?ll retain access to their original 121,000-square-foot building, which has been neatly grafted onto the new structure.

Link
 
And a couple images from the Globe article:

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Gizmodo.com - March 9, 2010
MIT Media Lab Extension: The New Home of Face-Melting Research

The world-renown MIT Media Lab is a place where every project is an amazing, unbelievable glimpse into humanity's technological future. Now, thanks to a massive $90 million extension, the architecture can match the wondrous excitement created within.

In case you haven't had the opportunity to swing by this particular block in Cambridge, Massachusetts, here's what the old Media Lab looks like. It's still there. In fact, you can see the extension under construction, and marvel at the stark contrast in design.

The six-level, interconnected extension, the work of the famed, award-winning architectural firm Fumihiko Maki and Associates, is like an immense Tetris puzzle. Every piece represents a functional element that is tightly connected to others, giving anyone inside the feeling of being inside a finished puzzle. Maki, himself the winner of a Pritzker Prize, was on hand over the weekend to officially open the MIT Media Lab. (It's technically been in operation since December.)

As he described it, each piece of this six-level building connects to the next. Balcony offices overlook open air labs and work spaces. Colorful stairways bisect the central atrium, their red, blue and yellow coloring inspired by Piet Mondrian's Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red.

Color aside, the trait hitting visitors in the face before they even walk through the door is glass. Cambridge building codes prevented a 100% glass exterior, so Maki came up with a loophole: bamboo. Inspired by translucent Japanese bamboo screens, Maki covered the remaining exterior with a mix of glass and aluminum tubes.


The result is at the same time beautiful and energy efficient, but also functional. We're constantly reminded that this is one incredibly open, collaborative working environment.

From the street, especially at night, passers-by can literally see lab work happening within. Maki called this "filtered views," inspired by the work of the pointillist artist George Seurat (lots of dots!). MIT played a part too, having provided Maki with an image of the Visible Man to further drive home the point that this lab space be open.

But enough architecture? What kind of world-changing stuff can we expect this multimillion dollar, 163,000-sq. ft. incubator to pump out in the future?

Well, if the past is any indication, plenty. The place that saw the beginnings of Guitar Hero, e-ink displays, OLPC and Lego Mindstorms is still driving much of the stuff that gets the Gizmodo editors, at least, sweating profusely in their blogging sweatpants.

The Media Lab will help "plumb the depths of how technology can have a greater impact on industry, society and business," said Media Lab director Frank Moss.

To net denizens and geeks like you and me, that boils down to robotics, prosthetic limbs, AI and the obligatory Minority Report UI reference that any article mentioning 3D interfaces must include.
Fluid Media

As part of the opening, I was lucky enough to get a tour or some, but not all of the departments at the Media Lab. Departments like Biomechatronics, Cognitive Machines, Fluid Interfaces, Molecular Machines, Personal Robots, Smart Cities, Synthetic Neurobiology. It reads like Stephen Hawkings' shopping list.

In any event, Fluid Media was one of the labs I got to tour first.

If you know Arduino, you'd be at home here, alongside the luminescent wallpaper, smart fabrics, "sewable computing" and inexpensive 3D fabricators that had me waxing nostalgic about Cory Doctorow's Makers.

The sense of play felt throughout the Media Lab's open spaces owes itself to the students, of course, but it's certainly assisted by the design. Moss called the atmosphere "serious fun," in a building where bright minds "design by serendipity." It's pretty spot on. One lab leads into the other, encouraging social and professional interaction. Artists huddle with biomechanical engineers. Sometimes the union is short-lived, and sometimes it's Guitar Hero.

But it's serious fun: There's a mission here, one that's produced limbs for soldiers maimed in war; helped children learn robotics with crazy new Lego software; and created a paint brush, simply called I/O, that captures the essence of whatever you point it at?visual, musical or otherwise.

Even so, the fun, relaxed environment is apparent in this lab that director Moss says will change our futures. He and others, like Lifelong Kindergarten Department grad student Karen Brennan, were genuinely having fun while working with these high concepts and brain-bending experiments. The future, wild as it will be, looks pretty fun. Seriously.

Send an email to Jack Loftus, the author of this post, at jloftus@gizmodo.com.
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This is really more of a photo essay, so it is worth while to click the link above!
 
I'll probably have some meetings there within the next few weeks, just in case anyone is excited for some grainy interior iphone pics..
 
I toured this building on its official opening last Friday. It is not in any way 'sterile'.
 
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