The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has undergone remarkable transformations in the past decade. Not since the mid-20th century, when the school commissioned Alvar Aalto’s Baker House and Eero Saarinen’s MIT Chapel and Kresge Auditorium, has the 90-year-old, 168-acre campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, seen so much formally adventurous new architecture. Notable projects of the billion-dollar campus building program include Simmons Hall, the riotously fenestrated dormitory by Steven Holl Architects [record, May 2003, page 204] and the Stata Center, a computer science extravaganza by Gehry Partners [record, August 2004, page 98]. The latest major new work is the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex (BCSC), certainly the least showy and arguably the most satisfying of them all. Designed by Charles Correa Associates, of Mumbai, in collaboration with architect of record Goody Clancy, of Boston, the seven-story, 412,000-square-foot BCSC is the world’s largest center for neuroscience research; it is also an elegant example of leading-edge laboratory design.
