The new Ray and Maria Stata Center for Computer, Information and Intelligence Sciences is part of MIT’s evolving campus building initiative: “The Institute recognizes that, as one of the world’s preeminent problem solvers, it must perpetually reinvent itself.”
In the case of the Stata Center, this reinvention involved taking down Building 20 – a.k.a. the Plywood Palace – a sacred space of sorts, a building with soul. MIT’s Building 20 was constructed in 1943 as a temporary structure to house the Radiation Laboratory and built to last only the length of the War. Fifty-five years – and many stories – later, Building 20 was memorialised, encapsulated and passed into the realm of myth and history.
The Stata Center is supposed to simultaneously draw on this mythical past and (re)position MIT for its future of multi-disciplinary innovation. It should “provide a facility that will not only encourage interaction among a broad group of occupants in the center but … also serve as a hub of student activity; a model for innovative, technologically-supported education; and a modern incubator for new ideas and technology, providing significant flexibility for multiple uses.”
In A New Village at MIT, Javier Arbona writes:
Behind MIT’s desire for this innovation incubator there is a conflicting will: to symbolically retain its place at the frontier of the future and simultaneously design the Jeffersonian past that it does not have.
In Frank Gehry’s Geek Palace, Spencer Reiss writes:
Love it or not, the two-tower, 2.8-acre Stata Center symbolizes everything the institute wants to be … The Stata Center is the linchpin of a $1.4 billion bet that space and place actually matter in the production of esoteric knowledge. It’s MIT’s $280 million ante in support of the idea that the boundaries dividing science into warring tribes are literally antique, and that the mystery of how humans think can be cracked by putting 1,000 hackers and other assorted “intelligence scientists” under one roof. The notion that the best science is interdisciplinary and serendipitous has been percolating for decades; Stata is supposed to prove it …
And so the site of a humble temporary structure is transformed, through history, into a magical place, and then into the site of new monumental architecture, a space for innovation and myth-creation, another architecture of power.
How do you make research pay for itself? How do you convince potential corporate funders that you’re really part of the 21st century? And how do you get tenured scientists to, er, produce? In a perfect world, none of that would matter. But then, in a perfect world, MIT wouldn’t have to compete with the university up the street that shall remain nameless, not to mention Caltech and Stanford, for the best faculty, the best students, the biggest grants, and general bragging rights, otherwise known as Nobel Prizes … The solution is to surround the creative types with other, equally creative people who will challenge their assumptions.
All of these spaces and practices are being mobilised in the Stata Center: history is being built and, as always, power is at stake. I can’t wait to see it in another fifty-five years.