MIT [Christminster]
Before I visited the Harvard campus, I went for a quick jaunt at MIT, a few exits closer to the city on the red line metro. I remember being 13 or so and telling a missionary that I intended to go to MIT. He laughed and said:
"You can't go to MIT."
I remembered that exchange on my walk and almost wept. Life is complicated in some ways, in others it's not. Sometimes the complexities overlap with simple truths and we find ourselves trying to confront the reality in which we find ourselves1a,b.
My first glimpse of the campus was the Stata Center, a recent Ghery addition to the campus. It's massive: a jumble of color, shape, and angles2. Parts look like brushed steel ala WDCH, others are brick, and still others are – get this – corrugated steel. We call that mabati3 in Nairobi.
There is an interesting history related to Stata Center which reveals a lot about MIT. In the 1940s, as a part of the war effort, the government began a lot of funded research related to microwaves and radar. MIT was selected as the location for this research and hastily a temporary building, Building 20, was put on campus after the research teams grew too large for their existing facilities. This temporary building ended up lasting 1943 to 1998, and housing successful researchers and projects concerned with everything from radars to linguistics. The Stata center was a replacement for the much loved Building 20 - it's part of something bigger at MIT, the Evolving Campus project.
Building 20, beautifully ugly.
An ariel perspective.
In the words of president, Charles M. Vest:
"At the threshold of a new century and millennium, the time had come once again for a bold and visionary building plan at MIT. We needed buildings that would address practical needs on campus but that would also reflect the brashness, energy, and excellence held within. We wanted to unify the campus by providing more communal spaces and fostering a more interactive learning environment."
I think what is revealed about MIT in something like Building 20 is that people are there getting stuff done. It's not a spectacle, it's not a campus with stones everywhere carved with "1880" or "1910," it's not a show of age and cultural gravitas. It's the kind of place where people build radars, robots, and software agents. Below the street, in basement office/labs, I could see people at work, doing stuff.
Besides representing brashness, energy, and excellence, one cannot observe the Stata center without wondering what sort of engineering leprechauns made Ghery's design work. It's as much about structural engineering as it is about form. Mabati included.
So, a bit bleary eyed and emotional, I turned into the heart of the campus to observe the entrance. Across the street I found the MIT chapel, a cylindrical silo of a building. A girl (student?) was inside but we didn't talk. It was very still.
Outside I made my last few maneuvers before boarding the metro for Harvard Square. I saw the Kresge Auditorium from the outside.
A short distance away I saw the Charles River. It was a picturesque end to my visit4.
1aCould I have gone to MIT? That's not really at issue for me. I wonder at where I am now, though, all the time. How I get to be who I am, and how it intersects with all the expectations I had for myself.
1bLong ago, I came to the conclusion that school, especially university, was everything you could take out of it. A painful case in point was a professor I had, Ron Cooper, who was a brilliant economist who decided to teach at Biola just to give his daughter free tuition for a few years. Not only did I take no interest in his classes, I joined fellow schleps in complaining that he was too abstruse. My realization is no matter where I went, this attitude would have poisoned me.
2Don't photos make it look like a toy? I doubt a building like this can really materialize for the observer except in person.
3Who knew that I'd have to go all the way to MIT to see mabati here in the US?
4I was disappointed to miss seeing Simmons Hall (Info). I simply didn't have enough time to find it.
8:03:50 PM 
|
