Imagining Mit: Designing a Campus for the Twenty-First Century

By William J. Mitchell

Book Overview

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In the 1990s, MIT began a billion-dollar building program that transformed its outdated, run-down campus into an architectural showplace.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, behind-the-scenes view of MIT's new buildings and the complex processes that produced them. The story is not simply one of commissions, projects, CAD, and hardhats; it is about all 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 throughout, Imagining MIT shows both the opportunities and the obstacles facing architectural production and city building at the dawn of a new millennium.

Mitchell challenges and subverts the standard form of architectural narrative--the mythic tale of heroic designers and enlightened patrons who overcome adversity to realize their visions. Instead, he offers a Rashomon-like construction of multiple 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 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262134799
• ISBN13: 9780262134798
• Release Date: March 2007
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 152 Pages
• Weight: 2.06 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 11.3" x 7.8"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Turning good to great ! : Vest and Mitchell made it happen !!!

Good books are fun and easy to read. They make the reader to laugh and smile, and at points, make the reader scribble and nod. The best thing about them is that they make one knowledgeable while laughingg. This book, by Bill Mitchell, is that kind of book. It's basically about five recent buildings that have changed the look of MIT. The star architects include, Roche/ Holl/ Gehry/ Correa/ Maki. Hearing such names, who would NOT want to hear the insider's story? Bill being Bill, his writing sends readers into tizzy and frenzy. Heavy issues such as; basic principles of Campus planning in the US, Georgian (Harvard) vs. Beaux Arts (MIT), Freeman's vision and Bosworth's realization, Aalto and Saarinen's inversion of Bosworth, are all debugged in Mitchellian fashion and flips the pages like Dan Brown's DaVinci Code. The whole plot of the story reaches its apex (at Gehry, primarily) as one case is unravelled after another. His choice of words and quotes are full of brilliance and wit, adding tremendous pleasure to the reading. I couldn't help but laugh when Bill skillfully said things like, "He(Zevi) smelled mannerism (in Saarinen)" or when he was comparing Gehry's Statta to Correa's BCSC, "In its (BCSC) massing, materials, and detailing, the whole composition acts as a discreetly sophisticated foil to Gehry's bravura performance across the street - so that the two buildings, like partners in a tango, electrify the space in between" or his quotes from Robert Campbell, "a policeman (BCSC) lecturing a drunk (Statta)." Another beefy and meaty knowledge that the prospect readers will gain is how world-class instituition, such as MIT, strivs to evolve and integrate its field of research to realize its economic/physical habitat.