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Archie Campbell Hee Haw village comes to Cambridge
(Source: The Boston Globe)

The newest addition to MIT is easy to ridicule. The cartoonish windows floating over stylized abstractions of what ‘building’ should be suggest not contemplative use of space but rather amusement park kitsch. A Computer Lab That Defies Gravity. What’s more, as Alex Beam notes in his scathing commentary in today’s Globe, the design and construction itself may be ramshackle at places.

Less easy to explain away are a bathroom door that opens directly to a view of a urinal, and unused metal wiring trays snaking along every wall, about 6 1/2 feet off the ground. They hold almost no wiring, because MIT officials decided to run wires under the floors instead. MIT lecturer Chris Terman, an advocate for the building’s occupants, says the trays will eventually be used: “If you come back in six months there will be a lot more.”

Here is a curious note on the office door of professor Randall Davis: “Professor Davis can be found to your left by the window, due to toxic (?) gas odors in this office.” Terman says that office has been plagued by ventilation issues “which we’ve been working to fix.”

“Let me show you my office,” were the first words I heard from Harold Abelson, professor of electrical engineering and computer science. I’ll have to have my vision checked, because I didn’t see an office; rather I saw a student lounge where Abelson’s office was supposed to be.

Abelson’s lab group has already contacted an architect who specializes in interior design about redoing their part of Gehry’s masterpiece. “People don’t know how to live in this building. There has been very little attention paid to planning for an open-space environment,” Abelson says. But I thought the Stata Center already had an architect — oh, never mind.

Ouch. In fairness, we should note that the Kendall Square environs are hardly going to be spoiled by even the most garish building. In fact, Gerhy’s deconstructive architecture may fit in just fine with the deChirico smokestacks and the post-industrial cityscape around MIT. Still, it’s hard to be excited by the new offering, especially as other universities’ new constructions, like Northeastern’s Building H or Havard’s Medical Research Center, have been excellent buildings - postmodern in their use of material and form, but still lovely from inside and out.

But architectural critique aside, I think the Globe’s Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker are on to something to lament some change in the university culture:

It’s hard to say which of the buildings is more remarkable. The old one didn’t have a name. It was called Building 20. The new one is flush with names. It’s the Ray and Maria Stata Center for Computer, Information and Intelligence Sciences, and parts of it are named after high-tech donors Bill Gates and Alexander Dreyfoos.

Building 20 was one of those “temporary” structures that never go away…. But Building 20 lived for 55 years and became a legend… Building 20’s greatness was its absence of architecture. In a building so lacking in character, it was impossible to establish academic or social hierarchies. Everyone was equal, and science was democratic, creative, and freewheeling. You could perform improbable experiments or bang holes in walls or roofs to connect up new equipment, because nobody cared what happened to Building 20. The result, say scientists, was the most productive building of its size in American history.

Sometimes I find MIT’s culture of numbers a little creepy (I’ve been told you can take the building and room number, apply some algorithm and get the telephone number). But undoubtedly, there is an egalitarianism that matched this culture. Not that all scientists are equal, mind you, just that their prestige lies less in their well-appointed offices or labs. And a university culture spending its efforts courting architectural prestige does fly in the face of that.