Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard - 2024 - The Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard at 600 Main Street in Cambridge, MA, features a striking design by the architecture firm Payette. The building is set on a triangular site and is characterized by its cantilevered mass, which floats above a continuous band of landscape on all sides. The design includes a minimalist exterior with a vertical array of scalloped aluminum sunshades, creating a soft and light appearance that contrasts with the surrounding corporate architecture. The building houses cutting-edge lab spaces, an atrium, a conference center, a café, and a daycare center, all designed to foster collaboration and innovation.

Graduate Tower at Site 4, MIT - 2020 - The Site 4 building at MIT, designed by NADAAA, is a key component of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s mixed-use urban development in Cambridge’s Kendall Square district. The structure comprises a 27-story residential tower rising from a four-story base, which integrates two existing historic buildings.Architecturally, Site 4 is notable for its LEED Gold certification and climate-resilient design, emphasizing resource sustainability and flexible use scenarios. The building’s facades are designed to engage with the surrounding streets and public spaces, creating a seamless connection between the campus and the city. The complex base houses multiple programs, including MIT’s Welcome Center, Innovation HQ, childcare facilities, and retail spaces.The design aims to increase density and animate the neighborhood by replacing former industrial lots and parking areas with new construction and green spaces. The building’s thoughtful approach to integrating public and private programs ensures that each facade provides something of interest, regardless of the angle of approach.

SoMa Site 3 Lab Building, MIT - 2021 - The SoMa Site 3 Lab Building at MIT, designed by Perkins&Will, is a 14-story, 451,000 square-foot laboratory and office building that is part of the South of Main Street (SoMa) development in Kendall Square. The building features a dynamic glass curtainwall façade with fins inspired by the Fibonacci sequence, providing shading and a rich texture. Its structure consists of a five-story base with a six-story mass rotated 90 degrees above it, creating dramatic cantilevers and reducing the perceived bulk along Main Street. The interior includes flexible floor plates to accommodate various tenants and future changes in building function. Ground-floor retail spaces enliven the area with restaurants and specialty retail, promoting pedestrian-oriented activities. Designed to meet LEED Gold standards, the building emphasizes energy efficiency and sustainability. This project reflects MIT’s commitment to innovation and placemaking, enhancing the scale and character of Kendall Square.

MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Building - The MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Building, situated on Vassar Street in Cambridge, serves as a computational research and learning establishment. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), the edifice, spanning approximately 178,000 square feet across eight levels, features a transparent design that encourages community engagement. It houses spaces that include a 250-seat auditorium, a collection of student areas for project work and tutoring, a café, and diverse seating arrangements for study and social interaction.

The building’s exterior is has a shingled-glass façade, providing a visual distinction between the lower and upper sections. The south-facing façade incorporates a double-skin design made of interlocking glass units, forming a deep sealed cavity. This design contributes to a reduction in energy usage by roughly 27 percent.

MIT Sloan School of Management - 2010 - The MIT Sloan School of Management is an integral part of the campus on many levels. The new building and master plan strengthens connections to the MIT Campus and Cambridge region, creates a social, academic and symbolic “Heart” within the East Campus and consolidates faculty to promote intellectual collaboration. This is achieved within an environmentally optimized building that allows for flexible programmatic implementation in the future. The 215,000 GSF project includes MIT Sloan faculty offices, MIT Sloan classrooms, executive education, dining, group study, related social spaces and below-grade parking. The building is high-performance, providing superior energy efficiency and creating a healthy environment by design. Sustainable elements include an effectively insulating building exterior and window system, sun shading devices and is ready to accept photovoltaic panels. The third floor flat roof is designed as a “green” sedum roof that is attractive, low-maintenance and reduces peak rainwater runoff. Creating and strengthening connections at multiple scales is one of the project’s primary goals. The design establishes these connections, which range from urban and campus-wide connections to fostering greater interaction between faculty and students on an individual level. The daylight-filled Gallery on the ground floor provides a social heart to the MIT Sloan campus. Encompassed by the dining facility, student lounges, business center and breakout spaces, the Gallery embraces the river court, which connects the interior to the landscape. The MIT Sloan School of Management is a vital part of the connective tissue of the MIT campus as a whole, while simultaneously existing as an independent entity, unique in character.

MIT Kendall Square Site 5 - 2020 - The Site 5 building at MIT, located at 314 Main Street, is a 17-story structure designed by Weiss/Manfredi. It serves as a strategic gateway between the city of Cambridge and the MIT campus. Architecturally, the building features a crystalline form and terracotta chroma, which connect the city’s architectural heritage with a forward-looking vision. The ground floor is highly transparent, housing active retail spaces and the lobbies for the MIT Museum and MIT Press. The upper floors offer column-free, flexible spaces designed for incubator offices and research.The building’s design emphasizes sustainability, with a high-performance building envelope that optimizes natural light and incorporates energy and water-efficient systems. The integration of public and private programs, along with its connection to the adjacent MBTA station and green spaces, fosters community interaction and contributes to the vibrancy of Kendall Square.

Altarpiece for MIT Chapel - 1955 - Bertoia's altarpiece screen or reredos was commissioned for Eero Saarinen's early modernist, non-denominational MIT Chapel in 1955. Suspended over the main altar, his cascading, open fret screen of slim metal rods and crossplates scatters light throughout the chapel. Described as one of Bertoia's most striking works, it is an integral part of the altar. Here, Bertoia has liberated sculpture from its base to usher in the contemporary era of spatial sculpture.

MIT Media Lab Expansion - 2009 - Built around a culture of cross-disciplinary research groups, MIT`s Media Lab has pioneered a dynamic research environment where academia and industry collaborate. Its new building is a workplace and a showplace for technological innovation, design, and the arts. At the heart of the building, a multi-tiered central atrium surrounded by research labs and informal gathering spaces offers a high level of transparency and interconnection between spaces. Seven laboratory spaces are vertically staggered around the atrium such that the lower level of one research space is on the same level of the upper level of another. This arrangement results in unexpected and engaging diagonal views from one laboratory to another and through the building to its outer glass wall. The atrium cascades through all seven floors and serves as the primary vertical and horizontal circulation. It is the building`s active social node with public spaces for exhibitions, performances, and impromptu gatherings. To provide a meeting place for the Media Lab`s many visitors, the new building is crowned with a conference center commanding a panoramic view of the Boston skyline across the Charles River. A large multi-purpose function room, an intimate presentation forum, and a flexible meeting and dining space surround the light-filled winter garden and terrace. The six-story building sits comfortably in its setting surrounded by lower campus structures. Its envelope of glass, aluminum panels, and aluminum pipe screen and its shaped roof profile create a light and delicately scaled presence amid its solid masonry neighbors. About the MIT Media Lab: Actively promoting a unique, antidisciplinary culture, the MIT Media Lab goes beyond known boundaries and disciplines, encouraging the most unconventional mixing and matching of seemingly disparate research areas. It creates disruptive technologies that happen at the edges, pioneering such areas as wearable computing, tangible interfaces, and affective computing. Today, faculty members, research staff, and students at the Lab work in more than 25 research groups on more than 350 projects that range from digital approaches for treating neurological disorders, to a stackable, electric car for sustainable cities, to advanced imaging technologies that can “see around a corner.” The Lab is committed to looking beyond the obvious to ask the questions not yet asked–questions whose answers could radically improve the way people live, learn, express themselves, work, and play.

MIT Alumni Pool - 1939

MIT Chapel - 1954 - Designed by the architect Eero Saarinen and completed in 1955, the MIT Chapel is a non-denominational space of worship and reflection. It is located in the MIT campus, next to the Kresge Auditorium and Kresge Oval, which were also designed by Saarinen. Its most striking features are its windowless cylinder form made of brick, its ondulating interior walls, and the altar, which presents a metal sculpture designed by Harry Bertoia which evokes a cascade of light.