MIT has some of the most cutting edge architecture you will find anywhere in the U.S. The most arresting is Frank Gehry's Ray & Maria Stata Center (Vassar St. near Massachusetts Ave.), completed in 2004. Bill Gates as well as the Statas was a heavy funder. Noam Chomsky (linguist) and Tim Berners-Lee (founder World Wide Web) have offices within.
MIT's "front" entrance is at 77 Mass. Ave, but the famous shot of the dome can be had from Memorial Dr. As a famous prank, students once cajoled a live cow to the top of the dome. One of my favorite mind bending buildings is Simmons Hall, also on Vassar St., built as an undergraduate dorm in 2002 and designed by Steve Holl. It's fantastic honeycomb or "sponge" design is mind boggling when confronted up close. Windows are square (5,500 of them !) and 2 ft in dimension. Most single rooms have 9 windows.
Mathematician and architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros has harshly criticized the Stata Center: "An architecture that reverses structural algorithms so as to create disorder—the same algorithms that in an infinitely more detailed application generate living form—ceases to be architecture. Deconstructivist buildings are the most visible symbols of actual deconstruction. The randomness they embody is the antithesis of nature's organized complexity...Housing a scientific department at a university inside the symbol of its nemesis must be the ultimate irony."
MIT's "front" entrance is at 77 Mass. Ave, but the famous shot of the dome can be had from Memorial Dr. As a famous prank, students once cajoled a live cow to the top of the dome. One of my favorite mind bending buildings is Simmons Hall, also on Vassar St., built as an undergraduate dorm in 2002 and designed by Steve Holl. It's fantastic honeycomb or "sponge" design is mind boggling when confronted up close. Windows are square (5,500 of them !) and 2 ft in dimension. Most single rooms have 9 windows.
Mathematician and architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros has harshly criticized the Stata Center: "An architecture that reverses structural algorithms so as to create disorder—the same algorithms that in an infinitely more detailed application generate living form—ceases to be architecture. Deconstructivist buildings are the most visible symbols of actual deconstruction. The randomness they embody is the antithesis of nature's organized complexity...Housing a scientific department at a university inside the symbol of its nemesis must be the ultimate irony."
Cool facts! nice quote on Stata!
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