Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Architecture

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Architecture

MIT School of Architecture and the School of Architecture and Planning, was the first in the United States, and has a history of commissioning progressive buildings. The first buildings constructed on the Cambridge campus, completed in 1916, is sometimes called "Maclaurin buildings" after Institute president Richard Maclaurin who oversaw their construction. Designed by William Welles Bosworth, these imposing buildings were built of reinforced concrete, for the first time in a non-industrial - much less university - building in the U.S.. Bosworth's design was influenced by the City Beautiful Movement of the 1900s, and features the Pantheon-style Great Dome housing the Barker Engineering Library. The great dome dominates Killian Court, where he began the celebration of each year. The friezes of the limestone buildings around Killian Court covers are engraved with the names of important scientists and philosophers. The impressive building 7 atrium along Massachusetts Avenue is regarded as the entrance to the Infinite Corridor and the rest of campus.
Alvar Aalto's Baker House (1947), the chapel and the Auditorium of Eero Saarinen (1955), and IM Pei's Green, Dreyfus, Landau, and Wiesner buildings represent high forms of post-war modernist architecture. Most recent buildings like Frank Gehry's Stata Center (2004), Steven Holl's Simmons Hall (2002), Charles Correa Building 46 (2005), Fumihiko Maki Media Lab Extension (2009) stand out among the area's classical architecture Boston and serve as examples of contemporary campus "starchitecture". These buildings have not always been well received, in 2010, The Princeton Review included MIT in a list of twenty schools whose campuses are "tiny, unsightly, or both."