Campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The campus spans approximately one mile (1.6 km) of the north side of the Charles River basin directly opposite the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.

Each era was marked by distinct building campaigns characterized by, successively, neoclassical, modernist, brutalist, and deconstructivist styles which alternatively represent a commitment to utilitarian minimalism and embellished exuberance.42°21′33″N 71°05′36″W / 42.3591°N 71.0934°W / 42.3591; -71.0934

Buildings north of the Grand Junction Railroad tracks paralleling Vassar Street are prefixed with N, while those northerly structures that are also west of Massachusetts Avenue are designated with NW.

[1][2] There are numerous minor refinements, tweaks, and exceptions in the room numbering and naming, providing plenty of material for a trivia contest, or for sussing out would-be impostors.

[8] Their sibling structure, the Natural History Society building, has survived to the present day by hosting a succession of retail stores after its original tenant moved to the current location of the Museum of Science Boston in 1951.

By the turn of the century, demands for new space for laboratories, offices, housing, and student unions were outstripping the land available in the now-fashionable Back Bay neighborhood, where real estate prices had risen rapidly.

Shepley's and Child's plans incorporated Georgian Revival styled, L-shaped, brick buildings set on symmetric grass avenues or quads, much like the recently completed Harvard Medical School, but were inappropriately sized for the industrial research that would occur within.

Despradelle's Beaux-Arts proposal would have partitioned the campus into separate zones for academic, research, and residential activities, but its World's-Fair-like layout provided insufficient space for laboratories.

President Maclaurin and MIT's executive committee sought to hire an established architect, rather than an ambitious engineer, to design the campus and briefly retained Cass Gilbert before conflicts with a determined Freeman drove him off.

However, later revisions began to incorporate more elements originally found in Freeman's designs such as double-loaded corridors and "open-grid, concrete structure with crossbeams supported by pairs of columns in the middle.

Architectural historian Mark Jarzombek later described the library space as a "capacious oculus [admitting] light into its center, and its perimeter surrounded by a row of Corinthian columns.

[20] Based on its psychological and numerical centrality to the main campus of the Institute, members of the MIT community sometimes humorously refer to the Great Dome as "The Center of the Universe".

The walls of this double-height full-floor space are decorated with classical allegorical murals painted by Edwin Howland Blashfield (1869, Civil Engineering), who was one of the best-known American artists and muralists of his time.

[30] In 2016, MIT cited data that 21.1% of Senior House residents failed to graduate, compared to the campus average of 7.7%, and a confidential survey found a higher incidence of drug use than other dorms.

[citation needed] The Rockwell Cage is part of the larger, interconnected Department of Athletics, Physical Education, and Recreation (DAPER) Complex, which is often referred to collectively as the Z-Center.

The giraffe is so-named because the piece consists of a pole, which is pressed into the floor and ceiling and thus is position-adjustable, adorned with several shelves that protrude in one direction and only rise to waist height, creating a giraffe-like shape.

[49] Professor Eduardo F. Catalano replaced Saarinen in 1961 and proposed a structure that would house meeting and practice rooms as well as commercial areas like a post office, tailor, barbershop, book store, and bowling alley.

Although initially well received, the complex design of the interior, a lack of storage space, heavy use by students, and austere exterior led to a major renovation in the late 1980s.

Professor Robert R. Shrock solicited Cecil H. Green '23, the founder of Texas Instruments, for a new building to house the geology and meteorology departments in a new Center for Earth Sciences.

Pei and Hideo Sasaki proposed siting a tall building in East Campus and breaking MIT's architectural tradition of "horizontality"[53] The tower has some functional purpose, since its roof supports meteorological instruments and radio communications equipment, plus a white spherical radome enclosing long-distance weather radar apparatus.

[55] The interior space consists of a research community of graduate students working in laboratory modules at the center, and faculty offices, lobbies, and teaching areas at each end of the building.

The building's exterior was designed by Kenneth Noland is meant as a metaphor of technology through the grids of graph paper and number matrices while also quoting the corridor-like morphology of the rest of the MIT campus.

The third floor consists of an indoor track and field space, including a small weights area,[63] which often must be shared by MIT's spring athletic teams early in the season, as the Cambridge weather tends to be too cold and/or snowy to practice outside.

Designed by architect Frank Gehry, the building is built in a Deconstructivist style - it is composed of an eclectic combination of shapes constructed using a range of materials from brick to glass to a variety of architectural metals.

This large, abstract environmental sculpture is a memorial to MIT Police Officer Sean Collier, who was killed in the line of duty on 18 April 2013 in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings.

It was conceived, designed, and constructed within two years of Collier's death, and is located on the site of a small landscaped bed between the Ray and Maria Stata Center and the David H. Koch Institute.

[76] The building contains undergraduate teaching labs used by the Chemistry Department for core curriculum classes,[77] as well as advanced chip fabrication facilities used for semiconductor and nanotechnology research.

Temporary buildings constructed during and immediately after World War II occupied many vacant lots around MIT, but the 1960 Campus Master Plan included Hideo Sasaki as a landscape architect.

The MIT art collection includes major works by Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore, Alexander Calder (La Grande Voile (The Big Sail)), Jacques Lipchitz, Dan Flavin, Dan Graham, Sarah Sze, Tony Smith, Theodore Roszak, Harry Bertoia, Jean-Robert Ipousteguy, Auguste Rodin, Anish Kapoor, Mark di Suvero, Louise Nevelson, Sol LeWitt, Frank Stella, Cai Guo-Qiang, and others.

In 2010, it was adopted by the "Kendall Band Preservation Society", a group of MIT students and staff who have redesigned and rebuilt some of the broken mechanisms (with the approval of the artist) that made the sculpture operate.