MIT dormitory makes a splash
An architect comments on MIT’s latest dormitory. Well you can’t please everyone…
Philip Greenspun’s Weblog
A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
An architect comments on MIT’s latest dormitory. Well you can’t please everyone…
Jason Young
March 7, 2004 @ 12:53 pm
Well, I can say I’m happy that architecture is alive and well at some Universities, unlike my own, but even with my own desire to see the unique, it’s hard to truly appreciate a building that was “inspired, by part, by a bathroom sponge”
Jim Worthey
March 7, 2004 @ 10:27 pm
Architects feel impelled to express themselves in chatter like “transforms a porous building morphology,” http://www.designboom.com/portrait/holl_simmonshall.html . However, two important ideas played a role in the Simmons Hall design. The idea of overhangs that exclude sunlight in summer, but not in winter, that is an established idea that always affects a building’s appearance. The other important idea is that of lighting as an optics problem.
MIT was the site of a great error of the 20th century. Parry Moon and Domina Eberle Spencer published a book and other materials that purported to treat lighting as optics. However, as far as I can tell, they omitted the light’s interaction with objects. Daylight is better than most artificial lighting, but for reasons that are not mystical. The sun covers only 10^-5 of the sky dome’s solid angle, but of course has high radiance within its disk. The radiance theorem in optics implies that radiance can go down but not up, as the light is reflected and refracted.
Ultimately, light from the sun, or even sunlight that takes one bounce from a surface, or one pass through glass brick, gives bright highlights and strong shading and shadows. Daylight also happens to do a good job of revealing color contrasts, relative to many artificial lights. The optical tidbits of highlights, shading, and color are the basis for normal vision, as a computer graphics or machine vision person will tell you. Just watch “Monsters, Inc.”
In his travel journals, Phil uses many photos, especially portraits, taken with the sun low in the sky. The architect is giving some of that low sun to the inmates of this dormitory. It is an accident of his social environment (the architect’s) that he must justify this through vague language.
Rob
March 9, 2004 @ 9:15 am
Architects should be required to live in the spaces
they create for at least a month.
dilbert dogbert
March 9, 2004 @ 3:32 pm
The school of architecture at UC Berkeley looks like it was designed by the same guy who built flak towers in Berlin for Adolph.
Stanford a couple of years ago built some student/grad housing and it is god awful compared to the MIT building. Much smaller scale thank god. I wonder if such designs result from the use of CAD programs or the use of Power Point to sell the designs.
Kurian Joseph Kattukaren
March 15, 2004 @ 12:39 pm
Just wondering what the influence the building is going to have on Students IQ.
Kurian Joseph Kattukaren
March 15, 2004 @ 12:39 pm
Just wondering what the influence the building is going to have on Students IQ.