This article describes the undergraduate dorms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a focus on student culture and dormitory life (including meal options). All undergrad MIT dorms are officially coed, and reserved for unmarried students, except McCormick Hall, which remains women-only. Because living conditions are strongly affected by architecture, there is coverage of that topic here. For a more esthetic architectural focus, see the article Campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Baker House,[1] located at 362 Memorial Drive, is a co-ed dormitory at MIT designed by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto in 1947—1948 and built in 1949. Its distinctive design has an undulating shape which allows most rooms a view of the Charles River, and gives many of the rooms a wedge-shaped layout. The dining hall features a "moon garden" roof that is also very distinctive. Aalto also designed furniture for the rooms. Baker House was renovated for its fiftieth anniversary, modernizing the plumbing, telecommunications, and electrical systems and removing some of the interior changes made over the years that were not in Aalto's original design.
The dorm was named after Everett Moore Baker, an MIT Dean of Students, who died in a plane crash in India in 1949.[2] The dormitory houses 318 undergraduates in single, double, triple and quadruple rooms. Baker's dining halls are open to all MIT students Sunday through Thursday.
Dropping a piano from the roof was started by former Baker resident Charles Bruno ’74 in 1972 and was resumed as an annual tradition in 2005.[3]
Notable Baker House alumni include Kenneth Olsen (Electrical Engineering, 1950), co-founder of Digital Equipment Corporation; Amar Bose (Electrical Engineering, 1951), founder of the Bose Corporation and inventor of numerous audio technologies; Alan Guth (Physics, 1968), astrophysicist and professor of physics at MIT; Timothy Carney (1966), former U.S. Ambassador to Sudan and Haiti; Gerald Sussman (Mathematics, 1968), professor of computer science at MIT; Geoffrey A. Landis (physics, Electrical Engineering, 1980), NASA scientist and science fiction writer; Cady Coleman (1983), NASA Astronaut; Wesley Bush (1983), Chairman and CEO, Northrop Grumman; Warren Madden (1985), Weather Channel meterorologist; Jonathan Gruber, healthcare economist and political advisor (Economics, 1987); Charles Korsmo (Physics, 2000), actor in movies such as Hook and Can't Hardly Wait; and Ed Miller, noted poker authority.
In the summer of 2009, Baker House alumni held a reunion to celebrate Baker's 60th Anniversary which received a Great Dome award from the MIT Association of Alumni and Alumnae.
Bexley Hall, located at 46-52 Massachusetts Avenue, is an early twentieth century brick building, consisting of four four-story walkups surrounding a central courtyard. It is almost directly across the street from MIT's Building 7 — old MIT official directories described it as being "just a stoned throw from the Institute's front door".[4] As former apartments which were renovated in the 1970s, Bexley suites have full kitchens and bathrooms. The soundproof walls of Bexley can be painted by students and are plastered with murals and graffiti, some of which date back to the 1960s.
Long known for its alternative culture, Bexley was among the first MIT dormitories to officially become coed, and it now houses 120 undergrads. It was also one of the first MIT dorms to be co-species, as residents used to let their cats roam free around the building decades before MIT officially adopted a cat-friendly policy in 2008.
Well known alumni of Bexley Hall include Dan Bricklin, co-inventor of the computerized spreadsheet, and Jeff Sagarin, a sports computerized ratings guru who first became known through his ranking and odds (betting) lines in USA Today, but who later was hired by the NCAA to help with computerizing the basketball tournament selection process. Also among best-recognized former Bexley residents were Institute Professor Jerome Lettvin and his wife Maggie who were Bexley "houseparents" in the 1970s and early 1980s. More recently, Drew Houston the founder and CEO of the MIT start-up Dropbox lived in Bexley.
The dorm has a tightly-knit community where people share their suites' halls with the rest of the Bexley residents to form a network of rooms and living spaces. The main Lounges (all, except for the "lounge" at the front desk, created in the 1990s) include the "FU$K" lounge located on the third floor on the north side of the building next to the 305 suite. There is also the Coke lounge located on the south side on the fourth floor. In addition to its alternative culture and anti-rush ideas Bexley is also notorious for alleged LSD manufacturing in the infamous BEXMENT in the 70's.[5]
Sometime in the early '70s, following leads in the phone hacking case of Cap'n Crunch, the FBI paid a visit to Bexley. Twenty to thirty Bexleyites filled a living room on the first floor of 46 Mass. Ave. and were "interviewed" by two FBI agents. "We shared popcorn, and asked them more questions than they asked us; the spirit was boisterous."
A graffito on the inside of a closet door at 50 Mass. Ave. said, simply, '2.361'. To an MIT student the decimal notation could only identify a course number--in this case, for a Mechanical Engineering course (Course 2). "A perusal of the current (1970s) catalog showed no such course. At the time, I worked in the stacks at MIT's library. They had old course catalogs, so I looked in one from the '60s, and, sure enough, there it was: 2.361 Friction and Lubrication".[6]
The May 1970 Grateful Dead concerts at MIT[7] were sponsored by Bexley's housemaster.
Burton-Conner House,[8] (shortened to Burton-Conner or BC), is located at 410 Memorial Drive, on the north bank of the Charles River. At maximum uncrowded capacity, Burton-Conner officially holds 344 students. The building is five stories high, plus a ground floor.
Burton-Conner is a combination of two major sections of the former "Riverside" hotel and apartment building, which MIT acquired and reopened as a dormitory in 1950. "Burton House" consists of the 3 western-most wings, while "Conner Hall" comprises the remaining 2 wings of the extended E-shaped structure. The two sections of the building are physically separated by a firewall above the ground floor; to pass from Conner 4 to Burton 4, a resident must first descend to the ground floor. In the 1960s, a dining hall was added at the rear of Burton-Conner, on the side away from the river. Some years later, the dining hall was shut down, and the space was renamed the Porter Room, a shared meeting and student event space. The entire building underwent a complete restructuring during 1970-1971, when the internal layout was changed from a floor orientation (with floor-wide bathrooms and gang showers) to a suite orientation (introducing kitchens, suite lounges, and semi-private bathrooms).
In the dorm, nine floors (2 through 5 on the Conner side and 1 through 5 on the Burton side) are used for student housing. On Conner 1 are the housemaster's apartment, a library with Athena-network computers, a study area, and the Residential Life Associate's apartment. On the ground floor, notable features include an electronics lab and darkroom (unused for over 10 years), music rooms, a game room, weight and exercise rooms, and a lounge with a snack bar.
Most residents name their floor by their section name followed by a cardinal number denoting their floor, such as "Burton 2"; however, Burton Third is the only floor that is often named by an ordinal number. Burton 2 has a large Jewish population because of the presence of a Kosher kitchen in its center suite. A group of Hillel students gather on Burton 2 after Shabbat (Jewish Sabbath) services and sit around a table to sing lively z'mirot (Jewish songs) in an event they know as "Tisch" every Friday evening.
In January 2011, current and former residents celebrated the 60th anniversary of Burton-Conner with a reunion gathering in the Porter Room. A special commemorative history[9] was compiled for the occasion, along with enhancement of an ongoing website for residents and alumni.[10]
Better known as East Campus or Fred the Dorm, the East Campus Alumni Memorial Houses[11] located at 3 Ames Street, are an undergraduate dorm formed from six "houses" each named after an alumna/alumnus of MIT: Munroe, Hayden, Wood, Walcott, Bemis, and Goodale. The six "houses" are arranged in two long north-south parallels, east and west, of three houses each, and are connected by floor. There are 5 floors, plus a basement, in each parallel. The houses are architectural entities; the floors are social entities: once a student has got to her room, she can more easily walk to any other room on the floor than go up or down stairs to another floor. A student would typically think of herself as a resident of Fourth East (fourth floor, east parallel) rather than a resident of Bemis House. Floors with distinctive cultures often have additional names such as "Beast" (Second East), "Tetazoo" (Third East), "Slugfest" (Fourth East), "Florey" (Fifth East), "Putz" (Second West), or "41st West" (Fourth West).
The dorm celebrated its 80th anniversary in 2005. Because of the dorm's age, the 354 undergrads living there are allowed to paint and alter rooms and floor common spaces, up to the limits of what the Cambridge fire code will allow. Students frequently use technology to customize their rooms, building projects such as an Emergency Pizza Button to have Domino's deliver a cheese pizza, a disco dance floor, and an automatic door-unlocking system.[12]
Notable alumni of East Campus include NASA astronaut Michael Fincke, Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress and George Smoot, co-recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics.
MacGregor House,[13] located at 450 Memorial Drive, was built in 1970 and is named for Frank S. MacGregor. It consists of a 16-story high-rise tower surrounded by a four-story low-rise. Both parts consist of suites grouped into "entries" of three to four floors each. The entries are named by letter: A, B, C, D, and E entries are located in the tower and F, G, H, and J entries are located in the low-rise. There is no I-entry, because (in true MIT style) i is imaginary.[14]
Each suite in MacGregor houses six to eight people, usually coed; the entire dorm houses 326 undergrads. Almost all rooms in MacGregor are singles; the three doubles in F entry are an architectural anomaly. Each suite comes equipped with a bathroom and a kitchen area with a stove-top; in addition, one suite in an entry will also have an oven.[14]
MacGregor features various amenities, including a music room, game room, and weight room. The central lounge, called the "TFL" (an acronym for "Tastefully Furnished Lounge") is on the first floor, near the convenience store located inside MacGregor.[14]
The structure at 305 Memorial Drive, now named after Fariborz Maseeh (ScD 1990, Civil Engineering), predates MIT's move to Cambridge in 1916, and has borne several names over the course of time. It is located at the intersection of Memorial Drive and Massachusetts Avenue, across the street from MIT's Building 1, and was originally operated as the "Riverbank Court Hotel" from 1901—1937. In 1938, MIT reopened it as "Graduate House", later renaming it "Ashdown House" after its first faculty housemaster. By the beginning of the 21st century, the building had become run-down and in need of renovation. Graduate students were moved out, to a new Ashdown House (NW35) located much further away, a controversial decision justified by a desire to house all undergrads as close as possible to MIT's central campus.[15][16]
The exterior of the building was repaired to stop water leaks and further deterioration, but there was no funding to renovate the interior of the structure. In 2010, Maseeh donated $24 million for the purpose of increasing MIT's undergraduate enrollment by 270 students (an increase of 6%).[17][18] To enable this, the number of undergraduate dormitory beds needed to be increased, since MIT now requires all undergraduate students to live in dormitories on campus for at least their first year. Maseeh Hall is the largest undergrad dormitory on campus, with 462 beds.
Opening of Maseeh Hall is scheduled for August 15, 2011.
Housemasters are Jack Carroll and Susanne Flynn (Professor in Course 24)
McCormick Hall,[19] located at 320 Memorial Drive, is a women-only dormitory housing 237 undergrads. It consists of two 8-floor towers (the east tower and the west tower) and an annex. The three sections are connected on the ground floor. Each tower has a penthouse on the top floor that looks out on the Boston skyline. The funds for building McCormick Hall came from Katharine Dexter McCormick (SB 1904, Biology), a leading biologist, suffragist, and philanthropist in the early twentieth century.[20]
The dining hall is open to all MIT students every weeknight evening.
New House,[21] sometimes referred to as New West Campus Houses, houses 291 undergrads at 471—476 Memorial Drive. The dormitory is a series of six joined five-story buildings arranged in a zig-zag fashion, each (like East Campus's sections) named after alumni. A main hallway on the first floor (known as "The Arcade") connects all the houses, and pairwise upper-floor connections also exist between houses 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and 5 and 6. (All of the smaller buildings comprising New House are also referred to as "houses.") There are kitchens throughout the dormitory. New House is connected through a tunnel to MacGregor House next door, so that residents can have easy access to MacGregor's convenience store.
Instead of having elevators, as in other newer dorms, air conditioning is available in the rooms of New House (limited funding forced a choice to be made between those two options). This feature becomes quite useful at the near-summer beginnings of fall terms and ends of spring terms, when local temperatures can reach up to 95° Fahrenheit.
Next House,[22] located at 500 Memorial Drive, is five stories tall and houses about 350 people. Patterned after the success of Baker House, it opened in September 1981. The Next House designation was unofficial and thought to be temporary until a sufficient donation had been received to name the dorm. As a result, the Institute has nearly always referred to the building as 500 Memorial Drive, while students have always called the dorm "Next House". It is divided into east and west wings which are connected at the center, so, like East Campus, location is referred to by "(ordinal number) (wing)" when spoken, or "(cardinal number) (wing initial)" when written, such as "5th west" or "5W". When Next House first opened, the hallway directly ahead of the elevator opening was referred to as "central," so one could live on "4th Central" as well; however, the lounge is now considered part of the west side. Each floor contains a large main lounge that faces the river, along with several smaller lounges, colloquially named in accordance to their location (e.g. "elevator lounge" or "far west lounge"), or nicknamed by their residents (ex. the 4W elevator lounge was dubbed the "White Rabbit Lounge" for the 2008-09 year). The 5th floor also features skylights placed various areas.
The first level is home to the infamous "TFL" (Tastefully Furnished Lounge, also the site of the annual "Next Act" theatrical production) along with music practice rooms, Next Dining (open everyday to all MIT students for breakfast and dinner), Athena cluster, and workout rooms. The basement level offers a laundry room, game area, and the Country Kitchen, where students are often seen cooking up various meals. The TFL was so named at the first Next House governance meeting after a suggestion was offered by a group of upper classmen who had moved from MacGregor House.
Despite its distance from campus, Next House is viewed as one of the most family-like dorms, thanks to its residence-based advising system and friendly atmosphere. Some students living at Next prefer to bike or take the Tech Shuttle to and from campus, while others enjoy the quiet walk.
Random Hall[23] located at 290 Massachusetts Avenue, was created by the joining of two old, identical buildings, a process known to some residents as "siamization." Random Hall is not actually named after anybody, but the fictional benefactor "J. Arthur Random" has been adopted by the residents.
Originally built in 1894 and converted to a dormitory in 1968, Random Hall is the oldest building owned by MIT, and lacks elevators. The four physical floors of the building are divided by the firewall which runs down its middle, with openings between the sides on the first and third floors, creating eight logical floors which each have distinct personalities and names. The two sides of Random Hall are known as the "290 side" and the "282 side", after the street addresses of the two entries.
Random Hall is the smallest of the MIT dorms, housing only about 93 undergraduates, and is located about a block past the northern border of the main campus. Random Hall is known for its bathroom and laundry machine online servers,[24][25] which allow people to determine remotely whether bathrooms and washers or dryers are in use.
Senior House,[26] is the oldest dormitory at MIT. Since its construction in 1918, it has served as the Institute's first dormitory and on-campus fraternity, a mixed undergraduate and graduate dorm, an all-graduate facility, a seniors' dormitory, and military housing during World War II. It is currently a co-ed residence housing 146 undergrads. The building is an L-shaped building directly adjacent to the residence of the President of MIT. A tower at the center of the North side features neo-classical columns that reflect the architecture of the original MIT Cambridge campus.
The building's street address is 4 Ames Street, but the mailing address is 70 Amherst Street, because the main entry was moved to what originally was the back of the building. Senior House has six entries:
Each entry has four floors, except for Runkle, which has six. The entries are arranged in an L-shape around a central courtyard. After major renovations, Senior House is one of two MIT undergrad dorms with air conditioning (May through September).
Senior House alumni include Lawrence Summers (Economics, 1975), former president of Harvard University and formerly Secretary of the Treasury during the Clinton Administration; Bruce Morrison (Chemistry, 1965), United States Representative for the 3rd Congressional District of Connecticut, 1983–1991; Moshe Arens (Mechanical Engineering, 1947), former member of the Israeli Knesset, defense minister, and ambassador to the United States; Gordon S. Brown (Electrical Engineering, 1931), former Dean of Engineering at MIT and a pioneer in the development of automatic-feedback systems and numerically controlled machine tools.
Simmons Hall[27] located at 229 Vassar Street, was designed by architect Steven Holl and dedicated in 2002. At the cost of $78.5 million, it is MIT's most expensive dormitory built on campus since Baker House.
It is 382 feet long and 10 stories tall, housing 344 undergraduates, plus faculty housemasters, visiting scholars, and graduate resident tutors (GRTs, MIT's equivalent of an RA). The structure is a massive reinforced concrete block, perforated with approximately 5,500 square windows each measuring two feet (0.60 meters) on a side, plus additional larger and irregularly-shaped windows. An 18" (0.46 meters) wall depth is designed to allow the winter sun to help heat the building while providing shade in summer, without air conditioning. The students complain that the very small metal window frames and screens create a Faraday cage which make it difficult to receive wireless telephone signals. An average single room has nine windows, each with its own small curtain.[28]
Internal design consists of one- and two-person rooms—some in suite-like settings with semi-private bathrooms—and lounges with and without kitchens, roughly arranged into three towers (the "A", "B", and "C" towers). Simmons Hall is one of the four dormitories that have dining halls; the dining facility is open Sunday through Thursday evenings to members of the MIT community.
The building has been nicknamed the "sponge", but opinions on the aesthetics of the building remain strongly divided. Simmons Hall won the 2003 American Institute of Architects Honor Award for Architecture, and the 2004 Harleston Parker Medal, administered by the Boston Society of Architects and awarded to the "most beautiful piece of architecture building, monument or structure" in the Boston area. On the other hand, the building has been criticized as being ugly,[29] a sentiment echoed in James Kunstler's Eyesore of the Month catalog.[30] Many of the residents of Simmons complain that aesthetics came as a higher priority than functionality. For example, residents in the "A" tower must take two different elevators, or must walk the length of the building twice (more than an eighth of a mile) to reach the dining hall because neither the "A" elevator nor "A" tower staircases reach the first floor, where the dining hall is located. Other oddities include staircases that do not offer access to every floor. Furnishings for dormitory rooms are custom-designed, modular, and made from plywood; they have received mixed reviews, garnering praise for their modularity, and criticism for their excessive weight and lack of durability.
Due to the architectural attention given to this building, architects are sometimes found trying to observe student life in the building, an occurrence that the students strongly resent (notices are sometimes sent out by e-mail when architects do enter the building, alerting residents to escort them out).
Additionally, as part of the MIT List Visual Arts Center's Percent-for-Art program, a piece was commissioned for the building by American artist Dan Graham. The sculpture, titled Ying Yang Pavilion, consists of a partially-reflective, glass-walled, gravel-paved area in the shape of half of the ying-yang symbol in plan, while the other half contains a shallow pool of water.[31] This pool is often populated by rubber ducks, the unofficial mascots of Simmons Hall. The art piece is located on a small terrace on the second floor of the building and is often used as a "jail" of sorts for unwanted guests, due to the fact that both entry and exit require MIT card access.
Simmons Hall was featured in the exhibit Inside the Sponge — Students Take on MIT Simmons Hall at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal in the fall of 2006.[32]