 MIT's Building 20March 27, 2018 |
If walls could talk
Twenty years ago this week, 200 mourners assembled in Cambridge, Massachusetts to hold a wake for a building: a ramshackle structure on the MIT campus, fringed with barbed wire, which was about to be demolished to make way for a sleek $300-million Frank Gehry project.
MIT's Building 20, known more poetically as the "Plywood Palace," had been hastily erected during World War II to house the Radiation Laboratory, the Allied forces' primary radar-development institute. It was a key site for one of the huge, timely scientific breakthroughs that helped the Allies win the war.
It was always meant to be a temporary structure, hence all that plywood and the lack of regard for fire codes. But the plan changed: After the war, the leaky, drafty, labyrinthian building was repurposed to house an eclectic collection of offices and amenities, including, in the early years, the Laboratory for Nuclear Science (including its "cosmic ray group"), the linguistics department, the machine shop, a particle accelerator, the ROTC, a cell culture lab, and a piano repair shop designated a "computer-free zone."
In this building, a striking range of breakthroughs were made: Aside from radar, the space birthed the commercial atomic clock, the technology to detect gravitational waves, modern linguistics and cognitive science, Bose speakers, and one of the first video games. What was so special about Building 20?
250,000 square feet: Size of Building 20's timber-frame structure
6: Months it took to build
$848,513: Cost of the building
3,897: People employed by the Rad Lab at the height of the war
4,000: Number of researchers, across 20 disciplines, the building housed after the war
20%: Proportion of US physicists who worked at one time in Building 20
9: Number of Nobel Prize winners who worked there
Building 20's big breakthroughs
🌟LIGO and gravitational waves
In 1916, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime created by massive objects merging or blowing apart. In 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory picked up the first evidence of them from the collision of two black holes far across the universe. The Building 20 connection: In 1970, physicist Rainer Weiss spent a summer holed up in a closet-sized room designing the basic experiment that led to the construction of LIGO.
🐸Inside a frog's nervous system
One of the more famous founding papers of modern cognitive science changed scientists' understanding about the nervous system. That paper was called "What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain." It demonstrated that, "at least in the frog, the nervous system was not a lot of wires topped by a great processor, as expected. Rather, some 'thinking'' occurred at the level of the nerves in the retina long before reaching the brain," according to the New York Times.
⏰The first commercial atomic clock
When Jerrold Zacharias was experimenting with atomic clocks in Building 20, "he removed two floors in his lab to make room for a three-story metal cylinder." One of the devices he ultimately created was the Atomichron, the first self-contained atomic clock (and the first piece of quantum electronics equipment) to be sold commercially. It was a huge factor in the adoption of atomic time, and led to the international definition of the second as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the cesium atom.
🗯Modern linguistics and the cognitive revolution
Morris Halle, who founded MIT's linguistic department in the '50s, was assigned to Building 20 because "nobody thought much of linguistics," according to the New Yorker. Halle liked the space because he was able to tear down room dividers and turn what had been a field characterized by library research into one centered around discussion and Socratic interrogation. Enter Noam Chomsky, who drew from biology and psychology to revolutionize the field of linguistics by proposing that all humans share the same biologically determined underlying linguistic structure. The work also contributed to the formation of the field of cognitive science, and the establishment of linguistics as a natural science.
🔊Engineering the Bose Corporation
Amar Bose was an electrical engineering student and a music enthusiast. Disappointed in the quality of the best hi-fi speakers on the market (and procrastinating on his dissertation), Bose started hanging out in Building 20's acoustics lab, down the hall from the electronics lab in 1956. Within a few years, he produced "a wedge-shaped contraption outfitted with twenty-two speakers" and founded his eponymous speaker company.
Knowledge spillovers
The physical places that have produced great quantities of original ideas—like the Ancient Greek agora or the 20th-century Parisian cafés where modernism blossomed—foster human interaction, as Jonathan C. Molloy writes in Architecture Daily. Unlike the carrelled library (or the cubicled office) they depend, like Halle's linguistics lab, on the unfettered interchange of ideas.
These are spaces that allow for what urban theorist Jane Jacobs called "knowledge spillovers"—when ideas cross disciplines, perhaps by way of incidental conversation that might take place in a hallway, elevator, or, in Jacobs' favorite example, the shipyards of Detroit that percolated the pioneers of the auto industry.
Building 20, in all its glorious disorganization, was ripe with spillover opportunities: The disparate departments in close proximity made it more likely that people from different disciplines would interact frequently. The building's rooms and wings were so haphazardly numbered that even longtime residents were constantly wandering lost in the hallways. And it helped that the space was sprawling and horizontal. As an engineer who worked there described it, "In a vertical layout with small floors, there is less research variety on each floor. Chance meetings in an elevator tend to terminate in the lobby, whereas chance meetings in a corridor tended to lead to technical discussions."
"You might regard it as the womb of the Institute. It is kind of messy, but by God it is procreative!"
— Jerome Y. Lettvin, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering, on Building 20
Taking the low road
But proximity to ideas and cause for conversation was just one part of what made Building 20 a lightning rod for Nobel-worthy work. Imagine the famed Silicon Valley garage that eventually gave rise to the sleek, glassy Apple campus. This type of not-overthought structure, which writer Stewart Brand called a "low road" building in his 1994 book How Buildings Learn, is low-cost and easy for occupants to modify. "Low Road buildings are low-visibility, low-rent, no-style, high-turnover," Brand wrote.
The whole point of a low road building is that you can do anything in them—nobody really cares. Because Building 20 was never meant to last, and operated somewhat outside the auspices of the university's physical plant department, scientists were free to customize their space to fit their needs, bolting equipment to the roof, spilling into courtyards, tearing down walls, tapping lines for water, electricity, and phone service whenever and wherever.
In other words, the building's inhabitants had "a generative relationship with the building," Molloy writes. "They improved the building and the building improved them."
Stewart Brand—also known as the founder of the seminal Whole Earth Catalog—made How Buildings Learn into a six-part documentary series for the BBC (with a soundtrack by Brian Eno).
The model-train club that sparked the video game revolution
The social center of Building 20 was the Tech Model Railroad Club, "a homogeneous group of very bright but lonely boys," according to Bradford Howland's memoir of the building. But from its earliest days, the TMRC was a breeding ground of early hacker culture: By the mid-1950s, the club had built a control system based on telephone relays which could run a train automatically.
In 1961, several members of the club created the first digital video game on the earliest mini-computer, Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-1, installed in the electrical engineering department's "kludge room." This relatively inexpensive, small-for-its-time machine had rare features including a cathode ray display, and students and employees were eager to develop features to show off its capabilities.
Inspired by sci-fi novels and Japanese tokusatsu movies, engineer Steve Russell and his collaborators created Spacewar!, a simple game in which two players fired torpedoes at each other. In accordance with the train club's (and burgeoning programmer community's) "hacker ethic", new programs were shared and could be modified, and soon other programmers were adding layers of functionality.
As they dispersed to other schools and employers, Spacewar! went with them. For the next decade, programmers fiddled with the code; by 1972, the game was popular enough that Rolling Stone sponsored the Spacewar! Olympics. The game became the basis for the first two coin-operated video games—Galaxy Game and Computer Space—in the early '70s, and was added to the Library of Congress in 2007.
A 1997 issue of the RLE community's newsletter was dedicated to photos and remembrances of Building 20.
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Today's email was written by Jessanne Collins.
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