Simmons Hall, Mit

By Redazione The Plan - 11 January 2010

The new residence hall in Cambridge campus is part of a porous strip of potential new MIT Buildings forming the Vassar Street edge along the Briggs Athletic Field. It offers a new type of undergraduate living. Instead of a brick urban wall we envision this strip as a porous membrane made up of four or five different buildings. The light, materiality, transparency of these buildings are particularly important as they have a position free of the normal city fabric on both sides. In a sense they are a “Living Front” for the residential district to be built to the north of them. As a “front” they must attempt not to block views. They should be “permeable”.
The 350 bed residence is envisioned as a vertical slice of a city ten stories tall and 330’ long. The Urban Concept provides amenities to students within the dormitory such as a 125 seat theatre, a night cafè, a house dining on street level and a street front restaurant with a special awning and outdoor tables. The corridors connecting the rooms are like streets (11’ wide) which happen upon urban experiences. As in Aalto’s Baker House, the hallway can be more like a public place, a lounge.
The Sponge concept transforms a porous building morphology via a series of programmatic and bio-technical functions. The overall building mass has five large scale openings. These roughly correspond to main entrances, view corridors, and the main outdoor activity terraces of the dormitory connected to programs such as gymnasium.
In this sense porosity as a massing concept would have programmatic potentials. The dormitory residence as a special housing type is not quite transient and not quite permanent. Social spaces must be planned to bring people together: provoking interaction, friendship and dialogue. On the other hand in the case of a residence hall, individuation of the student’s room, individual character of the cluster or collective portion, and individuation of the overall residential buildings can...