Public:Imagining MIT
From Facade
This page is a summary of the April 30 talk by Prof. William J. Mitchell about his new book, Imagining MIT. The book is a history and architectural critique of the several significant new buildings in the past 10 years: Simmons Hall, the Z-center, Stata, Brain & Cog, and the Media Lab extension.
I'll concentrate on aspects of the talk of relevance to FACADE: about Stata itself, resources he used in the presentation, and the emergence of 3-D CAD in architecture.
Video of the talk now available on MIT World
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/470/
Wreilly 09:12, 7 September 2007 (EDT)
Contents |
Background
Prof. Mitchell began by describing some common trends in the design of the new buildings:
- Increased consideration for the actual, observed, needs of the people using the buildings.
- Opening windows, because people want air.
- Many windows and large outside wall area, because people want views and natural light.
- Intricate "tunnels" through Simmons funnel sunlight into interior spaces.
- Informal social spaces like lounge areas and Stata's "student street" to encourage serendipitous conversations, an important part of the scientific process.
MIT needs such unusual and ambitious buildings as the Sponge and Stata
because as a world class university we have to provide "intellectual
leadership" in architecture, by example.
Stata Center
He covered the design process of Stata from the earliest conception (and a moment of appreciation for its predecessor on the site, Building 20, referring to it as a Broadway show that had reached the end of its run) to final product.
The napkin sketches and early crumpled-paper models were shown, as well as a number of early designs that clearly went in different directions than the one finally taken.
Note: He showed this for the Sponge as well: several alternate designs that were proposed, as well as a theme for the whole area of campus where it was built (a plan to build a giant "quad" around the athletic fields. This is consistent with his comments about the Z-center, and how it finally completed Saarinen's original vision of a "quad" in that part of the campus. The lesson to take home is that the context and greater planning around a building can be significant to architectural historians, even if it isn't completed for decades.
The interior spaces of Stata were consciously designed with input from the future residents. He showed pictures of physical block models that were manipulated to show different options; the pictures are probably the only record of that process.
Gehry's design process moved to physical models, growing more detailed and larger as the design solidified. There were pictures of what looked like a 1/12 scale model (dollhouse-sized) in several layers of a few floors each.
He didn't mention how the CAD model was initially created (legend has it, from 3-D scans of the models). CAD was essential; Stata could only be built "economically" by using 3D CAD, because of all the non-repetitive structures that had to be individually designed, checked, and engineered. Instead of one floor beam repeated along a rectilinear building, every structural element of Stata is unique, so automating the process was key.
Another advantage of 3D CAD was that it drove the engineering analysis and steel fabrication "directly".
In this part of the talk he presented several pairs of pictures showing a photo of the building (under construction or finished) on one side and the equivalent view in 3D CAD renderings on the other, so we could see how well reality matched the model.
The message to take home about preservation for teaching is that instructors will probably want to generate arbitrary views of the 3D models.
The CAD models also made it easy to compute the ratio of net space to gross space, an important metric for an MIT building. They decided to count "social" spaces as part of the net, instead of overhead, and had to recompute.
Brain and Cognitive Science Complex
When Prof. Mitchell moved on to Correa's Brain & Cognitive Science building, he mentioned that facing the Stata across Vassar St. is a challenging site, because "you can't out-Gehry Gehry." Instead, Brain+Cog plays the straight man.
For the Brain+Cog part of the presentation, he showed slides of Correa's hand-drawn studies and sketches showing how to fit a large wet-lab building onto the irregularly-shaped site while giving it a human scale and interesting exterior. There were also some 3-D visualizations, presumably from a CAD model of some sort, showing the evolution of the design.
Questions
One of the questioners after the talk recounted how the Stata was supposed to include a couple of large transparent globes. They were deleted for cost reasons. Mitchell confirmed that the structure to support the globes was retained, so they could theoretically be added some day.
That offers another use case for preserving usable 3-D CAD models: this unbuilt portion of Stata may need to be added some day, so it would save much effort and remain true to the architect's intent if the original CAD model can be used. Facilities will probably not be archiving anything that wasn't built.
