An open, collaborative space

Thursday, March 11, 2010 - 04:21 in Mathematics & Economics

The design of MIT’s new Media Lab building, which formally opened last week, is not only aesthetically pleasing, but also serves the interests of the lab’s own unique culture.“It’s a building that very specifically was intended to support a particular kind of community and a particular research style,” explains William Mitchell, the Alexander W. Dreyfoos, Jr. (1954) Professor of Architecture and Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT. Specifically, he says, it is intended to foster a serendipitous exchange of ideas among the “intensely cross-disciplinary” researchers by making the laboratory spaces exceptionally open, with broad and often surprising sight lines from one working space to another.Cross-disciplinary research is a hallmark of MIT in general, but at the Media Lab, this gets carried to extremes. The lab features research teams working on projects that range from designing new artificial limbs to new banking systems, from cuddly, personable robots to new...

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