MIT Media Lab Complex ready to illuminate

Mar 5, 2010 by Candace Lombardi

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–The Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Friday officially opened the doors to its MIT Media Lab Complex, the school’s most famous interdisciplinary program.

The new building, designed by architect Fumihiko Maki and his Maki and Associates firm, broke ground in 2007. But the Media Lab’s quest for expansion has actually been 12 years in the making, according to Adele Naude Santos, dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning.

Fumihiko Maki, a winner of the Pritzker Prize for architecture, was present at the opening event but did not speak publicly. Instead, he left Dean Santos, MIT Media Lab Director Frank Moss, and his architectural associates to explain the vision he, MIT, and his team had in designing the building.

“They picked Mr. Maki because their thinking was that, being from Tokyo, he could design a very interesting building on a very tight site,” said Santos.

“The model is literally open collaboration between industry and academia. Research here at the Media Lab is highly creative but finds its way into the world via industry. The idea of designing serendipity, this building was designed to promote this type of thinking and capturing in an uncanny way this magic,” said Moss.

Moss went on to point out that many innovations, including the Kindle and Guitar Hero, grew from technology that was developed at the MIT Media Lab.

Influences on the building’s design included the artists Piet Mondrian and George Seurat, as well as the art of Japanese paper lanterns. The white, glass, and aluminum building includes touches of the primary colors red, blue, and yellow, which are often found in Mondrian’s paintings.

The MIT Media Lab Complex design, which MIT had originally requested consist entirely of glass walls, had to be tempered to fit Cambridge energy requirements that restrict the use of glass construction in buildings. To accommodate the codes, Maki and his team integrated translucent aluminum screens over the building’s many glass and solid walls.

The screens over glass create a slightly pixelated view of the Charles River and Boston skyline when looking outside from within the building. It’s a nod to both the Media Lab’s digital world, as well as a pointillist adaption of landscape as seen in the paintings of Impressionist George Seurat.

Looking in at the Media Lab Complex at night, those same screens are lit from behind by the building’s interior lights and create semi-translucent views into some labs. The effect hints that a giant Japanese paper lantern has been plopped down on the corner of Ames and Amherst Streets in Cambridge.

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