MIT Simmons Hall by Steven Holl

    Here we are at Simmons Hall, a building designed by Steven Holl, an architect based in New York. The building is part of a larger masterplan designed by Steven Holl for MIT which include a different educational and residential buildings. So far this is the only building build as part of this masterplan.

MIT Simmons Hall © Flickr- username: Adam Fagen

 The building hosts dorms for college students. It is inspired by the idea of porosity. Every floor has this public spaces, which are open to maybe three, four or five different levels that are accessible for students and they can use them either for studies area or for lounges where they can meet their friends.

Entrance Lobby © Flickr- username: Kyle Burrows

    Every level also has a balcony, which are these large cuts that you can see in the building, so you can either go to the indoor space of the so called caves on these very sculpture spaces in the interior, or you can on to the outdoor terrace and enjoy the views of Boston on one side or of Cambridge on the other side. Interestingly the structure of the building is in the facade so we don't have building in which he have separation of this facade and structure, but the structure itself is shown with this square grid that you see in the facade. So there are two lines of structure on the side of the corridor in the inside and then there are two structural lines right where the facade is.

Main Entrance © Flickr- username: jacqueline.poggi

     The facade is prefabricated as most of the project so the construction was easier, faster and cheaper. You can see the colours in the facade a blue, a red , orange and yellow. The colours express the structural stresses in the facade itself, so the more red we have the more structural stresses we have in that point and the more blue we have the less tension we have. So in a way its a building that shows us how it works, even if we don't see actual structures, even if we don't understand how the actual structure is designed, the colour in the facade tells us a story about it. Another interesting thing about this building is the idea of scale in the facade, as you can see is made of this square grid in which we don't really understand how many floors the building has as we look at it from the exterior. 

Mediation Room © Flickr- username: Kyle Burrows

     That idea of the scale is translated to into a different building by Steven Holl in Beijing where you have the slab that coin sides with the grid of the facade, so in that case it really tells us how many floors the building has. In this case is slightly ambiguous: we don't really understand the correspondence between the slab and the structure which creates this very interesting perception of the facade as we go closer to it and as we enter the building and see it from the interior. The building hosts also some public spaces on the ground floor. It has cinema, entertainment rooms, playgrounds and the dinning hall of MIT.

Skylight inside a cave © Flickr- username: Kyle Burrows

     Some times we have interesting moments when the caves go inside and actually alter the space of your room, so you may have a room wich is this octagonal plane and all of a sudden you have this curvilinear surface that goes inside and interrupts the space and creates these very unique special moments in the interior. Every floor, every room has three different windows on different heights, so you can see either up in the sky, or you can see down to the city, or down to the sports field. Students can personalize their room and furniture is modular, so you can assamble your bed in a different way, you can move your table in different way and you can really play with it, so its very creative and inspiring space.