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Imagining MIT: Designing a Campus for the Twenty-First Century (MIT Press)

Amazon.com Price:  $13.95 (as of 06/05/2019 15:06 PST- Details)

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Description

The story of the decade long, billion-dollar building boom at MIT and how it produced major works of architecture by Charles Correa, Frank Gehry, Steven Holl, Fumihiko Maki, and Kevin Roche.

In the 1990s, MIT started a billion-dollar building program that transformed its outdated, run-down campus into an architectural showplace. Funded by the high-tech boom of the 1990s and and driven by a pent-up demand for new space, MIT’s ambitious rebuilding produced five major works 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 Fumihiko Maki’s still-unrealized project for the Media Laboratory. In Imagining MIT, William Mitchell (who served as architectural adviser to MIT president Charles Vest) offers a critical, at the back of-the-scenes view of MIT’s new buildings and the complex processes that produced them. The story isn’t simply one of commissions, projects, CAD, and hardhats; it is about all of the forces that come into play — including money, politics, institutional dynamics, and ideology — when a major university campus is imagined, designed, and built. Lavishly illustrated with architectural photographs, drawings, plans, and models, with color images all through, Imagining MIT shows both the opportunities and the obstacles facing architectural production and city building at the first light of a new millennium.

Mitchell challenges and subverts the usual form of architectural narrative — the mythic tale of heroic designers and enlightened patrons who overcome adversity to realize their visions. As a substitute, he offers a Rashomon-like construction of a couple of voices and viewpoints. He sets the scene by recounting the history of MIT campus architecture, from its early synthesis of classicism and pragmatism to the daring mid-twentieth-century modernism of Alvar Aalto and Eero Saarinen. The descriptions and illustrations of the new projects show not only the evolution of each and every building, but the relationship of the techniques of architectural representation — themselves evolving, from sketching and modeling to three-dimensional computer modeling and rendering — to the conception and development of architectural ideas.

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