Imagining MIT ─ Designing a Campus for the Twenty-First Century

In the 1990s, MIT began a billion-dollar building program that transformed itsoutdated, run-down campus into an architectural showplace. Funded by the high-tech boom of the 1990sand and driven by a pent-up demand for new space, MIT's ambitious rebuilding produced five majorworks of architecture: Kevin Roche's Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center, Steven Holl's Simmons Hall,Frank Gehry's Stata Center, Charles Correa's Brain and Cognitive Science Complex, and FumihikoMaki's still-unrealized project for the Media Laboratory. In Imagining MIT, William Mitchell (whoserved as architectural adviser to MIT president Charles Vest) offers a critical, behind-the-scenesview of MIT's new buildings and the complex processes that produced them. The story is not simplyone of commissions, projects, CAD, and hardhats; it is about all the forces that come intoplay--including money, politics, institutional dynamics, and ideology--when a major universitycampus is imagined, designed, and built. Lavishly illustrated with architectural photographs,drawings, plans, and models, with color images throughout, Imagining MIT shows both theopportunities and the obstacles facing architectural production and city building at the dawn of anew millennium.Mitchell challenges and subverts the standard form of architectural narrative--themythic tale of heroic designers and enlightened patrons who overcome adversity to realize theirvisions. Instead, he offers a Rashomon-like construction of multiple voices and viewpoints. He setsthe scene by recounting the history of MIT campus architecture, from its early synthesis ofclassicism and pragmatism to the daring mid-twentieth-century modernism of Alvar Aalto and EeroSaarinen. The descriptions and illustrations of the new projects show not only the evolution of eachbuilding, but the relationship of the techniques of architectural representation--themselvesevolving, from sketching and modeling to three-dimensional computer modeling and rendering--to theconception and development of architectural ideas.