A bumper crop you shouldn’t bump
From pies to lattes, this time of year is dominated by pumpkins. But few are as beautiful as the blown-glass pumpkins of all shapes, colors, and sizes that covered Kresge Lawn one recent Saturday. The sea of glittering gourds was no autumnal illusion; in fact, it was MIT’s annual Great Glass Pumpkin Patch. The annual fundraiser sells some 2,000 glass pumpkins at prices from $20 to more than $600, generating funds sufficient to cover the yearly expenses of the MIT Glass Lab, the glassblowing studio in the basement of Building 4. Founded in 1986 by Michael Cima, now the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, the Glass Lab enjoyed a prosperous first decade through a combination of good luck, ambitious students and artists, and generous departmental funding. But by 2000, Cima realized that for the Glass Lab to remain sustainable over the long-term, it...