Baker House

Baker House is a student residence designed by Alvar Aalto located at MIT University in Boston. The curving form of the building protects the building from the busy street along the Charles river by having each window at an angle to the street whilst providing each room with excellent views.

Circulation is located on the side of the building facing MIT allowing the movement and circulation of the building to relate to the activity of the university. The staircases are designed to allow unobstructed views along their entire length increasing the visibility of the students moving through the building and increasing the opportunities for informal interaction.

The brick building with timber window frames gives the building a pleasant domestic feel which reminded me of early 20th century dutch housing. The planning provides important communal areas and a variety of room types for different students increasing the sense of community and diversity within the building.

Kresge Auditorium

Kresge Auditorium, 1953-55, was designed by Eero Saarinen. It is located opposite the MIT Chapel on the Kresge Oval. The pair of buildings were designed to define MIT’s social cohesion. The Auditorium being designed for formal events and the chapel designed for marragies and memorial services with the oval in between as a public space for civic events.

The auditorium is an elegant copper clad roof which springs from the ground at three points with sheer glazed walls that fill in the arches created by the form of the roof. The sheer glazed walls offer views into the lobby and out onto the green. The roof was constructed as a thin-shell structure of concrete which was an innovative building technique at the time of construction.

The building contains a concert hall which can seat 1226 people and a small theatre with 204 seats, and rehearsal rooms, dressing rooms, offices, bathrooms and lounges. The domed roof allows the interiors to remain column free. The lights, loudspeakers and ventilation where incorporated into the hanging acoustic treatment on the roof of the auditorium.

MIT Chapel

Eero Saarinen designed the non-denominational MIT Chapel in 1955. It is located opposite the Kresge Auditorium which was also designed by Saarinen.

The oval chapel is a cylindrical brick form constructed of rough and imperfect bricks which catch the sunlight on the textured surface. The building sits in a shallow moat and is supported by a series of low arches of different radii which rise out of the moat that reflects patterns of light onto the exterior wall of the chapel and evokes images of bridges spanning a river.

To enter the small chapel one walks from the public spaces surrounding the chapel into a small grove of birch trees enters through the timber doors which are located off the main oval and turns 180 degrees to head back through a enclosed glazed bridge into the circular chapel and is then drawn towards the light falling onto the white marble altar from the ceiling. The glass of the bridge evokes images of larger stained glass windows in traditional churches and creates a separation from the world outside. The textured internal brick walls and the full height metal sculpture by Harry Bertoia allow the glittering light to cascade down into the space from the circular skylight above. Additional twinkling light is reflected off the small moat and into the space through shallow slits in the walls.

I have been surprised by how Saarinen’s buildings are smaller than I expected, they are small gems of mid-century modern architecture that are rich in ideas and materiality which is intensified by Saarinen’s ability to strongly express architectural ideas with the given scale and materials. Saarinen is not attempting to create the power of his architecture by increasing the scale of any one gesture rather making each element the appropriate scale and designing with an elegance which compresses the ideas and architectural gestures into dense and rich architecture.

Simmons Hall

Simmons Hall students residences at MIT designed by Steven Holl in 2002 is part of a major building program which included buildings by Frank Gehry and Fumihiko Maki. The building includes 350 dormitories, a 125 seat theatre, gymnasium and cafe.

The design was intended with varying degrees of success to create a large degree of informal interaction between students in both free form communal spaces, the street front cafe and corridors designed as internal streets. The structure was designed to allow for a large degree of flexibility to accomodate five large openings in the building which define main entrances, communal areas and roof terraces.

Each floor is three windows high making the building appear larger than it actually is and results in each room having nine operable windows puncturing a thick facade providing solar protection during summer and allowing the low winter sun to enter the room. The coloured window frames represent the ten houses within the building.

Holl said the building was inspired by a sponge to create a porous building that can absorb a variety of programs. The building whilst interesting lacks the same level of consideration for the residents and homeliness as Alvar Aalto's Baker House at MIT.