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Built Environment Bold buildings are rising from MIT's soil. Simmons Hall, the silvery, gridded undergraduate dorm designed by Steven Holl, began collecting prizes when it opened last fall. Frank Gehry's Stata Center, an expressionist academic complex described both as "genius at work" and a "drunken barn dance" opens this fall. The campus as design studio provides "a complete immersion in an architectural idea of enormous proportions," said architecture graduate student Josh Barandon. MIT's Evolving Campus — more than 15 new buildings and major renovations now under way — celebrates invention in student housing, interdisciplinary working and learning spaces, and public gathering places. The architectural metamorphosis adds nearly one million state-of-the-art square feet to the 154-acre campus already home to buildings by Alvar Aalto, Welles Bosworth, I.M. Pei, Eero Saarinen. School of Architecture and Planning Dean William J. Mitchell symbolizes how MIT intellectual leadership informs new environments. As President Charles Vest's architectural advisor, he has encouraged daring design on campus. As dean, he embraced wired learning in the Architecture Department's renovation. As scholar and author, he has examined the melding of digital and physical spaces. Now, as he moves to the academic leadership of the Media Arts and Science Program, Mitchell will shepherd the construction of an extension designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Fumihiko Maki that will nearly double the Media Lab. In this issue, openDOOR examines MIT's many approaches to the built environment:
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Institute of Technology