List of Massachusetts Institute of Technology undergraduate dormitories

This is a list of the undergraduate dorms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The undergraduate dormitories at MIT have been historically divided into two cultural groups. The East-sided dorms (Senior Haus, Random Hall, East-Campus, and Bexley) are most often stereotyped as having a counterculture hacking environment, and a high degree of concern over campus issues. Most other dorms, geographically located on the West side of campus and often collectively referred to as "West Campus", are generally considered to have a more traditional college dormitory atmosphere, although there remain large cultural differences amongst them. Disputes over the cultural affilations of Simmons Hall and Random Hall remain as they are located relatively far from other dormitories and typically engage in their own exclusive activities.

Baker House

Detail of Baker House facade onto the Charles River.

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.

Baker House has historically been known on campus as the most social dorm on campus. Many of MIT's more outgoing students call Baker House home, and parties occur frequently in the dorm. The higher up one goes in the six-story building, it is said, the louder and more active the community is.

The purity test originated at Baker House. A common annual activity in the 1970s was the piano drop.

MIT campus "hackers," when giving entering students unusual tours of the campus (often by means of less accessible paths), often instruct their "tourists"--if caught--to tell campus security that they were "just on their way to Baker House."

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 in the snow.

File:Bexley Hall cartoon.jpg

Cartoon representation of 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. After past renovations, there was some concern that the dorm would lose its character as residents would alternatively shout "suburb" vs "ghetto" in the courtyard. Bexley is currently dealing with a censorship problem as complaints from non-resident parents have lead to announcements that the first floor of Bexley will be whitewashed.

Traditionally the home of a distinctive anarchic and free-spirited subculture, even by MIT standards, Bexley Hall has long been a "thorn in the side" of the MIT administration; nevertheless, the MIT hacks and other assorted cultural aspects of Bexley have always been in the best MIT traditions, more creative and technologically innovative than mean-spirited or destructive. The 1976 freshman handbook entry reads "anywhere but Bexley", while there were stories of earlier anti-rushes which included tours of the basement specially undecorated for rush week.

The sense of community among the residents has served as emotional support for many students who would not have fit in well in more mainstream dormitories, especially in the culture of academic stress MIT is known for. Although inherently leaning socially and politically towards the youth/"hippie" culture of the '1960s', the Bexley community discriminates against nobody based on their lifestyle. The unofficial Bexley email list is known as BMF, or Bexley-minus-fascists.

Bexley was among the first MIT dormitories to be coed, despite the best efforts of the administration, and the only dormitory to have its House cat serve as dorm chairman (all the more remarkable in that cats were not then allowed in MIT dormitories). Bexley is also notable for the graffiti and murals that cover all available wall space; the inhabitants are generally allowed to paint / wallpaper most areas. Suite 210 even incorporated a bar and an in-wall aquarium in the early 80s.

Bexley during the Blizzard of '78

In late spring, Bexley hosts the annual Beast Roast party--an all day party open to anybody that takes place in the courtyard and includes plenty of food, live music, and other amenities. It was originally held as a spoof of Senior Haus's 'Steer Roast' but has continued as a beloved Bexley tradition.

Well known alumni of Bexley Hall include Dan Bricklin, co-inventor of the computerized spreadsheet, and Daniel Dern, founding editor-in-chief of Internet World (the first Internet-related print publication), Managing Editor and Executive Editor of Byte.com, and freelance author, internet writer, columnist, and pundit. Arthur Hu developed the DOS Visicalc / 1-2-3 alike Twin Spreadsheet in the 1980s, and wrote many commentaries on affirmative action and Asian American issues in the 1990s for Asian Week.

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. While the ground floor connects the two wings of the dorm, the first through fifth floors are, although physically joined, separated by solid wall, preventing a student from passing between, say, Conner 4 and Burton 4 without going downstairs. Students have taken to using the adjoining fire-escape as a "speedway" between the two sides. The fire escape connects a bathroom in Conner to a suite lounge in Burton.

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 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.

The nine floors have various personalities, ranging from noticeably social to quiet and studious to even fraternity-like. The separation between the two wings has allowed the development of distinct characters on the opposite sides of the separating wall.

East Campus Alumni Memorial Housing

Aerial view of the two parallels of East Campus Alumni Memorial Housing.

Located at 3 Ames Street, the East Campus Alumni Memorial Houses (usually known simply as "East Campus" or "EC", nicknamed "Fred", and sometimes spelled "EAsT camPUS") 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. Residents more closely identify with the floor they reside on, even though their residency is technically categorized by their house. The dormitory has room for 358 residents, with most floors housing about 40 students.

The floors are normally referred to either by "(ordinal number) (side)" (similar to Next House), as in "2nd West"; by abbreviation, such as "1E" (1st East); or by nicknames, such as "Slugfest" (4th East), "VDub" (5th West), "Tetazoo" (3rd East), "Beast" (sometimes "The Beast from the East") (2nd East), "Stickmen" (1st West), "Putz" (2nd West), "Floor Pi" (3rd West), "41W" (4th West), and "Florey" (5th East).

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. Most halls are covered in murals representative of the residents over the years and the floor's unique culture.

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.

East Campus wiki

East Campus website

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. There is no "I" entry because in mathematics "i" represents an imaginary number, hence the "I" entry is also imaginary.

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, sometimes dubbed "MacCon," is a place where students can buy food, drinks, and various supplies for dorm/school life.

The MacGregor mascot is Sheba the Wonderbeast.

MacGregor's architecture is somewhat infamous among students because it causes the wind to blow strongly against anyone approaching MacGregor from Massachusetts Avenue. This phenomenon has been nicknamed the "MacGregor wind tunnel".

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.

Basic Floor Plan of New House

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", a name that suggests why the dorm was called "New" as a name.

New House includes several culturally-themed houses—"La Casa" ("Spanish House"), "La Maison Française" ("French House"), "Das Deutsche Haus" ("German House"), and "Chocolate City" (an association of African-American male students). New House at one time also contained "Russkii Dom" ("Russian House") but this group has since dissolved. The cultural are typically smaller subdivisions of each of the numbered houses, e.g. floors 4 and 5 of "House 5". Briefly in the 1980s, the top floor of House 4 was known as "Vard House" after a language, Vardebedia, that was allegedly invented by one of the floor's residents in the 1970s.

Offical New House website

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".

File:Bora Liba Mikic 1982.jpg

Bora, Liba, and Sue G. in 1982

The original Housemasters, Bora and Liba Mikic, were part of the Next House community from its opening in 1981 until the end of the 2006 academic year. George Hosker, the House Manager at opening, remained with the dorm for nearly as long. The main lounge off the lobby of the dorm is known as the "Tastefully Furnished Lounge" or "TFL," and was named such by residents who had come from MacGregor Hall (which has a room of the same name) in the first year of the dorm's operation. The joke at the beginning was, naturally, that the TFL had yet to be furnished.

Next House is one of the four dormitories with a dining hall; the facility is open every weeknight evening to all MIT students.

Next House is well-known among students for its theater production group, Next Act.

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.

The 282-side consists of (from the bottom to the top):

• Destiny Floor (all-male), which auctioned its naming rights on eBay. They were bought by Derek Dahlsad, who named the floor after his daughter Destiny. Destiny Floor has a reputation for its skill in wood and metalworking, often building elaborate projects such as robots, potato cannons, or the MythTV server. This floor also has one of the two exits through the dorm firewall.
• Loop Floor (all-female), which keeps cats, bakes cookies, and stays calm.
• Clam Floor (all-male), which acquired its name after an unfortunate accident involving a freshman cooking group and a bushel of oysters prompted them to paint a large mural of a clam (allegedly an oyster) on the wall. Clam was the first floor to have an actual name and contains a manhole set into the floor, a wall-Scrabble and wall-chess game, and the other exit through the dorm firewall.
• Bonfire Floor (co-ed), which got its name when residents decided to change its name from "DomFore" and looked for a name that required the fewest paintstrokes necessary to alter a large mural. Bonfire Lounge has about half of the dorm's communal videogame systems and far too much sci-fi on its media server.

The 290-side consists of (from the bottom to the top):

• Foo Floor (all-male), which has only three residents. Most of the space on this floor is taken up by the large Main Lounge, home of the FooBar and center of dormwide social events. It also contains the front desk, which sorts mail and keeps out malevolent strangers.
• Black Hole (co-ed), home of the nicest kitchen in Random and many of the dorm's roleplayers and assorted crazy-fun people. Black Hole is notable for murals of a pair of dragons and of a black hole. Also has the other half of Random's communal videogame systems.
• BMF (all-female), which reputedly stands for Bad Mother-F***ers (as a response to the grief residents got as an unnamed all-female floor in 1999). BMF is on the other side of the firewall exit from Clam, making it a big social hangout.
• Pecker Floor (all-male), which consists almost entirely of math majors to the point where it recruits residents directly out of summer math camps and competitions. Pecker is also the home of MegaHAL, Random's resident AI. Pecker now houses The Milk, a carton of milk which expired on October 20, 1994 and is kept in a biohazard container. The milk resided in Bonfire until August 2006.

Random has a rather nice roofdeck, although residents are strictly forbidden to throw material down the twin lightwells (a process called "shafting"). The basement contains washing machines, a workshop, an EE lab, a bike room and a trunk room. In a similar arrangement to other MIT dormitories, Random has three live-in Graduate Resident Tutors, as well as a live-in Housemaster and her family. Residents are allowed to paint or modify their rooms within the limits of the Cambridge firecode, as well as being allowed to paint murals in communal spaces.

Random Hall is known on the MIT campus as one of the calmer yet stranger dorms. In terms of institute culture and student lifestyle, it is often grouped with and shares interests with the East-sided dorms, along with East Campus, Senior House, and sometimes Bexley Hall. 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. It has also developed "Random Standard Time," a special timezone in effect only within Random Hall, used to avoid the inconvenience of dealing with day changes at midnight when most residents are awake. Random Standard Time uses 24 hour notation with a 6 hour offset, such that midnight becomes 2400h and 1 am of the following day becomes 2500h of the same day, which continues until 2959h when it rolls over to 0600h the following day.

The mascot of Random Hall is Ozok the Destroyer and its holy number is 17 (the most random number). Its logo is a clipper ship flying a "17" pennant, although a lowercase "rh" stylized into an upside-down psi is also used. It is sometimes known as "The World's Smallest Nuclear Power."

Random Hall official Web page

Senior House

Senior House entrance on Amherst Street

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"). A nice feature of the dorm was that residents could make alterations to their rooms. Such "improvements" were not officially sanctioned by the Institute, but the management often looked the other way, particularly if the improvement had artistic or technical merit.

As MIT prohibited pets other than fish, Senior House was often home to a collection of "furry fish," which breathed air, had four legs, and purred.

Renovations in the 1990s changed the layout of Senior House, but not its character, which is loosely based on various influences including hard rock and goth culture. The walls between the individual entries were removed and the room layouts themselves were changed. The front desk was moved from Ware entry to the first floor of Runkle and an elevator was installed. After the dust settled, the address was changed to 70 Amherst Street.

Senior House is well known for its annual Steer Roast, a large weekend-long party held each spring since the 1964. Steer Roast has many traditions, including the roasting of a large steer in the court yard, a fire-lighting ceremony, and mud-wrestling.

Senior House's motto is "Sport Death", which roughly means to live life to the fullest. The motto is accompanied by a human skull painted with an American flag pattern, an image adopted from the cover of an edition of Hunter S. Thompson's book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. Like the book cover skull, the original "Sport Death" skull had swastikas in the eye sockets, which were later removed. The teeth of the Sport Death skull spell "Only life can kill you."

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.

Senior House official Web page

Simmons Hall

Simmons Hall.

Simmons Hall is a dormitory located at 229 Vassar Street, designed by architect Steven Holl and dedicated in 2002. It is often nicknamed "the Sponge" or the "space waffle" due to the combination of its exterior appearance and the ten multistory atria which were, in fact, inspired by a sponge. Student culture often elects SpongeBob SquarePants as an unofficial mascot.

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, 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.

While architects often flocked to visit the landmark dormitory when it was opened, the dormitory is now closed to uninvited visitors to protect student privacy, comfort, and safety, and the students are generally vigilant about spotting and escorting out architects who come to observe the building and its residents.

External links

• Official MIT housing page for Bexley
• Photos of Baker House
• Baker House homepage
• East Campus homepage
• East Campus 2w Putz web cam
• Random Hall homepage
• The Evolving MIT Campus - Simmons Hall
• Official MIT housing page for Simmons Hall
• Senior House homepage