Buildings
MIT Reboots Media Lab Project
(archrecord.construction.com - 10/27/2006)
By Ted
Smalley Bowen
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click image to view larger
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| Courtesy Maki and
Associates |
Mothballed in the aftermath of the dot-com
collapse, the expansion of MIT’s Media Lab, designed
by Fumihiko Maki, has been reconfigured and relaunched. The
revised 163,000-square-foot scheme of labs, studios, offices,
and meeting space is a scaled-back version of Maki’s
Modernist design from the late 1990s. Groundbreaking for the
$120 million, six-story building is slated for spring 2007.
Unrealized during MIT’s recent
spate of marquee projects, the Media Center project had to
be resold to decision makers as a space that would benefit
numerous departments and the greater campus community, according
to Adele Naude Santos, dean of MIT’s school of architecture
and planning. “There’s a larger mission than serving
one entity,” she says. During the go-go ’90s, the
Media Lab, avatar of the so-called new economy’s melding
of digital media, advanced design, and marketing, proposed
funding the building itself through mostly corporate donations.
As the tech bust proved, Santos explains, “that was not
a tenable position.” MIT wound up investing in the project
along with corporate and private donors.
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Maki’s minimalist steel, glass,
and aluminum design includes a double curtain wall and external
aluminum screens. The light-filled interior features open
floor plans, overlapping spaces, and several large atria.
An extensive basement level was eliminated from the original
design and the building’s mechanical systems and other
details are being updated, according to Santos.
The new building will connect to the
Media Lab’s current home, the Wiesner Building, designed
by I.M. Pei and completed in 1984. The combined structures
will accommodate the Media Lab, the List Visual Arts Center,
the architecture and planning department’s visual arts
program, and the MIT program in comparative media studies.
The new building will also house the Okawa Center for Future
Children and the LEGO Learning Lab.
That the plans could be dusted off relatively
easily is a testament to the durability of Maki’s design,
according to Santos.
“He does things with extraordinary
elegance and clarity and he’s incredibly efficient,”
adds William Mitchell, professor of architecture and media
arts and sciences and former dean of architecture and planning.
“He manages to get a lot of program onto a tight urban
site.”
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