MIT in Focus
Open House for Design
Walk inside Building E14, the new extension for MIT’s Media Lab and School of Architecture and Planning, and you’re in a four-story atrium, all white and gray and sharp edges. Look up, and you see another atrium that sits in the center of the third floor. Walk up the open stairway toward that second atrium, and you’ll see yet more atria—more precisely, the building’s core is a vertically staggered set of seven labs, each with an open lab space surrounded by two floors of offices.
Designed by Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, the Institute’s latest building doubles the territory of the Media Lab’s original home, with 163,000 square feet of offices, labs, and meeting rooms. The battleship-gray extension is joined at the hip on its north side to the E15 Wiesner building, and embodies lessons learned there.
“An essential ingredient in the Lab’s distinctive approach to ‘open innovation’ has been its exploitation of open physical spaces,” says Media Lab director Frank Moss. The new building exemplifies this predilection for adaptable atelier-style work areas tailor-made (and remade) for the Lab’s cross-disciplinary projects.
The six-story E14 also bundles in plenty of venues for social and intellectual interaction. Generously sprinkled with coffee nooks, conference rooms, and exhibit spaces, the extension dedicates its entire top floor to public places—a central “winter garden” for meetings, receptions, and dining; a wood-paneled 100-seat theater; a hall for exhibitions and performances; and a terrace with a great view toward the Charles River.
This workspace and social center is the capstone for a building that aims to foster open communication, collaboration, and visibility. Especially visibility. Throughout E14, transparent walls let you eyeball ongoing research in each lab. Three of the outside walls are mostly glass, shaded by a curtain wall of aluminum bars. Even the atrium elevators are transparent.
Together with the Wiesner building, the extension will house the Media Lab, the Media Arts and Sciences academic program, the Comparative Media Studies program, the new Art, Culture and Technology program, the Center for Future Civic Media, the Center for Bits and Atoms, and the Okawa Center for Future Children.
That list of tenants just hints at the wild variety in disciplines found in these two buildings. Engineers, scientists, designers of all kinds, architects, planners, visual artists, mathematicians, musicians, performance artists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, educational researchers, storytellers, and other professionals create an astonishing range of projects.
But the unifying theme is simple: Design, and not design for its own sake.
All here are working toward the same basic goal: to leverage design and technology in imaginative ways that improve the quality of human lives and societies.
It’s fitting that their new home itself is a bold design—a greenhouse for great designing.
