Imagining MIT by William J Mitchell

Imagining MIT by William J Mitchell

In the 1990s, MIT began a billion-dollar building program that transformed its outdated, run-down campus into an architectural showplace.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.

Alexander W. Mitchell is the Alexander W. Mitchell is the Alexander W. Mitchell is the Alexander W. Mitchell is the Alexander W. Mitchell is Dreyfoos is a Senior Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences at MIT's Media Lab, where he also oversees the Smart Cities research group. He formerly served as the Dean of the School of Architecture and the Director of the MIT Program in Media Arts and Sciences. Imagining MIT: Building a Campus for the Twenty-First Century, Positioning Words: Symbols, Space, and the City, Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, e-topia: Urban Life, Jim--but Not as We Know It, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn, and The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Age, all published by The MIT Press, are among his works.