List of Massachusetts Institute of Technology undergraduate dormitories: Difference between revisions
cleaned up external links: removed extraneous floor-culture-specific websites, made everything fair by including all dorm homepages in alphabetical order, and one link to the official ug housing site |
whoops forgot burton-conner. i can't find a homepage for bexley. |
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*[http://web.mit.edu/housing/undergrad/ Official MIT undergraduate housing website] |
*[http://web.mit.edu/housing/undergrad/ Official MIT undergraduate housing website] |
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*[http://baker.mit.edu/ Baker House homepage] |
*[http://baker.mit.edu/ Baker House homepage] |
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*[http://web.mit.edu/burton-conner/www/ Burton-Conner homepage] |
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*[http://ec.mit.edu/ East Campus homepage] |
*[http://ec.mit.edu/ East Campus homepage] |
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*[http://web.mit.edu/macgregor/www/ MacGregor House homepage] |
*[http://web.mit.edu/macgregor/www/ MacGregor House homepage] |
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Revision as of 23:15, 5 July 2007
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This is a list of the undergraduate dorms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Baker House
Baker House, 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. It has an undulating shape which allows most rooms a view of the Charles River, and gives many of the rooms a wedge layout. Aalto also designed furniture for the rooms.
As of 2006, Baker is one of the four undergraduate dorms that have dining halls; dining is open to all MIT students every weeknight evening.
Baker House alumni include Alan Guth (Physics, 1968), astrophysicist and professor of physics at MIT; Kenneth Olsen (Electrical Engineering, 1950), inventor of magnetic core memory and co-founder of Digital Equipment Corporation; Amar Bose (Electrical Engineering, 1951), founder of the Bose Corporation and inventor of numerous audio technologies; Gerry Sussman (Mathematics, 1968); Charles Korsmo (Physics, 2000), actor in movies such as Hook and Can't Hardly Wait; Ed Miller, noted poker authority.
Bexley Hall
Bexley Hall is a former apartment building, consisting of four four-story walkups surrounding a central courtyard. It is located at 50 Massachusetts Avenue, across from MIT's main entrance. As former apartments 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 funky murals and tongue-in-cheek graffiti, some of which dates back to the 1960s.
Bexley was among the first MIT dormitories to be coed.
Well known alumni of Bexley Hall include Dan Bricklin, co-inventor of the computerized spreadsheet.
Burton-Conner House
Burton-Conner House (or simply "Burton-Conner" or "BC") is an undergraduate dorm located at 410 Memorial Drive. At maximum uncrowded capacity, Burton-Conner holds just under 350 students. The building is five stories high plus a ground floor.
Burton-Conner is a combination of two major 'portions' of the building: the larger Burton side, which was opened in 1950, and the smaller Conner side, which was opened in 1970.
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. Most residents name their floor by their side name followed by a cardinal number denoting their floor, such as "Burton 2"; Burton Third, home of the Burton Third Bombers, is the only floor that is often named by an ordinal number. 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 10+ years), music rooms, a game room, weight and exercise rooms, and a lounge with a snack bar.
East Campus Alumni Memorial Housing
Located at 3 Ames Street, the East Campus Alumni Memorial Houses 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 of three houses each, and are connected by floor.
The dorm celebrated its 80th anniversary in 2005. Because of the dorm's age, students are allowed to paint and alter rooms and floor common spaces up to the limits of what 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 an automatic door-unlocking system.[1]
East Campus was the location of the Time Traveler Convention on May 7, 2005.
Notable alumni of East Campus include Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress and George Smoot, co-recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics.
MacGregor House
MacGregor House, (named for Frank S. MacGregor) located at 450 Memorial Drive, 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.
Each suite in MacGregor houses six to eight people, usually coed. Almost all rooms in MacGregor are singles; the three doubles in F entry are a mistake. 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.
MacGregor features various amenities, including a dark room, music room, game room, and weight room. The central lounge, TFL, is on the first floor, near the Campus Convenience store. This convenience store is a place where students can buy food, drinks, and various supplies for dorm/school life.
McCormick Hall
McCormick Hall, located at 320 Memorial Drive, is a women-only dormitory consisting 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.
Location is referred to by suite, which reflects which kitchen one gets to use. For example, the annex is considered one unit, as is each floor on the west tower (2nd west, 3rd west, etc up through 7th west). Since the east tower has two kitchens per floor, one would say that one lives on 3rd east riverside or 3rd east campuside, etc.
As of 2006, it is one of the four undergraduate dormitories with official dining halls, which are open to all students every weeknight evening.
New House
New House (471-476 Memorial Drive) 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 upper-floor connections also exist between houses 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and 5 and 6. (Although they are subdivisions of New House, all of the smaller buildings comprising New House are also referred to as "houses.") There are kitchens dispersed throughout the dormitory. In addition, New House is connected through a tunnel to MacGregor House so that residents can have easy access to MacGregor's convenience store.
Instead of having elevators, as in many other dorms, air conditioning is available in the rooms of New House (since 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 degrees Fahrenheit.
New House is sometimes referred to as "New West Campus Houses".
Next House
Next House (500 Memorial Drive) is five stories tall and houses about 350 people. 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 (even though they are connected at the center), so, like East Campus, location is referred to by "(ordinal number) (wing)", such as "5th west".
Next House is one of the four dormitories with a dining hall; the facility is open every weeknight evening to all MIT students.
Random Hall
Random Hall, located at 290 Massachusetts Avenue, was created by the joining of two old, identical buildings, a process known to some residents as "siamization" (from the Siamese twins). 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 address of the two entries.
It is the smallest of the MIT dorms, housing only about 90 undergraduates. Random Hall tends to be somewhat quieter and odder in community structure than the average college dorm: for example, it is known for its bathroom and laundry machine online servers (bathroom.mit.edu and laundry.mit.edu, respectively), which allow people to determine whether bathrooms and washers or dryers are in use.
Senior House
Senior House (sometimes referred to as "Senior Haus") 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 the World War II. It is currently a co-ed undergraduate residence. 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 address was originally 4 Ames Street, and had six entries:
- Ware
- Atkinson
- Runkle (John Daniel Runkle, second president of MIT)
- Holman (Silas W. Holman, Professor of Physics)
- Nichols (Ernest Fox Nichols, ninth president of MIT)
- Crafts (James Crafts, fourth president of MIT).
Each entry has four floors, except for Runkle, which has six (the upper two floors are often referred to as "Towers").
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, defence 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
Simmons Hall is a dormitory located at 229 Vassar Street, designed by architect Steven Holl and dedicated in 2002.
It is 382 feet long and 10 stories tall, housing 350 undergraduates, faculty housemasters, visiting scholars, and graduate assistants. The structure is concrete block perforated with approximately 5,500 square windows each measuring two feet (0.60 meters) on a side, and additional larger and irregularly-shaped windows. An 18" (0.46 meters) wall depth supposedly provides shade in summer while allowing the winter sun to help heat the building. Unfortunately, the efficacy of such a design is yet to be proven and temperature problems plague parts of the building throughout the year. 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.
Opinions on the aesthetics of the building remain strongly divided. On one hand, 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 is very often considered ugly by the student body,[6] and this sentiment is echoed in James Kunstler's "Eyesore of the Month" catalog here. While the building had many social goals that were set in place by the architect, the residents of the dormitory often disapprove of its interior design. Small entryways to lounges and the lack of adequate lighting in rooms due to the dark ceilings are common complaints. A design fault and poor insulation in the second-floor glass corridor also caused a flood. [7]