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Wiesner Building / Center for Arts & Media Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Cambridge, Massachusetts
Completed 1984

5-story educational facility with exhibition galleries, media laboratories and performance spaces
 

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Strategically located at the threshold of MIT's developing East Campus, the Wiesner Building serves as a literal and symbolic gateway between past and future. The goal was to unite the traditional arts with emerging media, while creating a world center of vanguard technology and design. The project was undertaken as a venturous experiment in artistic integration, and was partially funded by the largest grant that had yet been awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Architect and artists collaborated from the outset in order to merge public art into an integral and permanent part of the built environment. The artist Richard Fleischner executed the siteworks, Scott Burton sculpted exterior and interior seating, and Kenneth Noland, the well-known painter, adopted the lobby's five-story aluminum wall as his "canvas." Corners, surfaces, planar relationships, and form were jointly explored with the architect, as were color, variable light, and interior and exterior space. The goal in both process and product was to create the kind of fully integrated environment which, common in the Renaissance, had disappeared under 20th-century specialization.

The building houses sophisticated shared resources for nine previously disparate fields of study. Organization of the interior as a variable loft accommodated current needs — and also the uncertain requirements of media technologies yet to be invented.

Major Components

3,200 s/f ground floor lobby; 3,600 s/f lower lobby; 3,900 s/f Experimental theater; 2,499 s/f video / film auditorium (200 seats); 2,000 s/f video production studio; 5,900 s/f Computer Studio; 44,500 variable loft space; 820 s/f sculpture gallery

I. M. Pei & Partners services

Site Planning; Architectural Design; Interior Design of public spaces

Structural

Leslie E. Robertson Associates, New York, NY

Mechanical / Electrical

Segner & Dalton, Valhalla, NY

Lighting

Jules Fisher & Paul Marantz, New York, NY

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