The new home for the recently established MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been completed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
What will be a research hub for AI and other disciplines in the computing sciences offers 185,000 square feet of labs, collaborative spaces, classrooms, and faculty areas inside a shingled profile that defines two eight-story pavilions.
The structure's design was limited by an existing railroad track running along the site’s north axis, creating the need for a 44-foot bridge that connects to either volume across three levels. After entering its oak-finished triple-height lobby from a central plaza area, engineers and researchers have space to explore flexible arrangements in the offices along its perimeter on Vassar Street.
The building includes social kitchens, a large 250-seat lecture hall, conference rooms, and a top-level terraced event space with a capacity for 350 people. MIT says they hope to make this a particularly welcoming “center of gravity” for its undergraduate population as now more than half have major or minor concentrations in the college.
The project, which follows SOM’s previous work on the US DOT’s new Volpe National Transportation Systems Center nearby, has achieved an overall energy reduction of 31% below current LEEDv4 baselines. Its high-performance facade exterior combines with a green roof and a host of green strategies, including on-site stormwater retention to target LEED Platinum certification and other sustainable outcomes. Arup principal Julian Astbury says: “These techniques empowered MIT to make informed decisions regarding critical design components, aligning with their decarbonization and sustainability objectives.”
Schwarzman College’s dean, Daniel Huttenlocher, also stated that it will work to “advance social, ethical, and policy dimensions of computing,” adding it is “designed to be the computing crossroads of the MIT campus — a place to bring a mix of people together to connect, engage and catalyze collaboration.”
This is the first new academic construction included as part of the MIT 2030 strategic plan. It will be followed by the inauguration of the new Music department building this year and the mixed-used Kendall Square Site 2 project from Elkus Manfredi at 200 Main Street.
10 Comments
The flybys are quite something!
So good
+++++
This is subtle, understated, and orderly, yet quietly complex and powerfully suggestive in ways appropriate for a computer center, ways that I would be reluctant to give a simple name. Those seemingly floating planes with slightly overlapping rows, that extend beyond the building, take us in all kinds of directions without taking us away from the sense of the building, its purpose and structure. They do, however, encourage thinking beyond whatever happens there and take us out into the world. They suggest a kind of opening up and out, extension. I'm curious how SOM sees them. And are they original? Is there any strong precedent here?
No showy gimmicks here, and I suspect this design will hold up for many years.
Jean Nouvel used flybys to great effect in the Cartier Foundation back in the '90s. But combining shingled panes with flybys at this scale is something I've yet to see and it works well.
What is a fly-by and what is the sense of the term? I ran across this, on the fly: https://www.wdgarch.com/projects/1999-k-street-nw
My link explains it.
Found this https://www.buildingenclosureonline.com/articles/90716-demystifying-the-fly-by-curtain-wall-parapet very informative too
For most people it will be just another grid, nice as it is.
Sorry to be the outlier here, but this is boring AF. Nothing screams "computing" like wood paneling and 90s spaces. The sheet of glass in the front is interesting but a one liner.
(We should debate more.) Another way to look at it is that it refers to and extends a tradition half a century + old. The more substantial grid box is opened up and becomes nearly immaterial, a fitting image for the technology today.
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