Materials Research Activities

Bob Simha on MIT's Building 13 for Materials Science & Engineering

Bob Simha

Former Director of MIT's Planning Office

interviewed by Arne Hessenbruch, transcribed by Jose Rivera, edited by Bob Simha.

Arne Hessenbruch

Maybe we should start with you personally and then talk about your role at MIT as the context, and then go to Building 13?

Bob Simha

When I was appointed the Institute's planning officer in 1960 my responsibilities were to undertake and implement a long-range campus plan for MIT's development. The institute was at the cusp of a major expansion, perhaps the largest expansion in its history since it moved to Cambridge in 1916. The purpose of establishing the planning office and then my subsequent appointment was to ensure that the physical development was done in concert not only with MIT's own academic programs but in a manner that would ensure that it was expanding and developing in a way that was congenial with the residential and community needs of the MIT campus. A plan that would also respect the needs and aspirations of our host city: Cambridge.

At the time the environs to the north of the MIT campus were quite unpleasant. The neighborhood was essentially an antiquated 19th- and early 20th-century industrial district with a wide variety of manufacturing activities, many of them odiferous and not particularly attractive. These conditions had existed in 1914 which encouraged the architect of the original MIT plan to face all the buildings toward the Charles River. Now it was time to begin to look in the other direction and to find a way of relating to our neighborhoods to the north and to the evolution of the campus as a more integral part of the city. Essentially our mission was to prepare and execute a plan for this little city that we call MIT that could develop within the larger cities of Cambridge and Boston. As a city planner trained here at MIT, I saw that mission as a normal part of my professional function and that was what we set out to do.

At that time MIT was led by some extraordinary people with vision and perspective. Chairman James R. Killian and President Julius A. Stratton had participated in the development of the so-called Lewis Committee report that had been prepared 10 years earlier in 1948-49. This report laid the groundwork for the intellectual agenda and development priorities of the institute. So, when we come to the beginning of the '60s those aspirations are now beginning to take concrete form. The Center for Materials Science and Engineering building, Building 13, was one of those intellectual priorities. Other goals at the time included, among other things, communication sciences, the life sciences and the earth sciences. All of these represented target areas where MIT wanted to focus the attention of its intellectual capital.

Arne Hessenbruch

So these priorities were explicit at the time?

Bob Simha

Oh yes, and as I mentioned they grew out of a rather extensive study by a distinguished group of faculty members who obviously conferred with many other people about what the strengths at MIT were, where the research opportunities in the future would be, where MIT should invest its intellectual and its research resources and of course, where it could find the necessary support. In one sense, the Materials Science and Engineering building is a classic example of that sequence of events by which MIT charts its way. The Metallurgy Department from whom a substantial number of the original stimulators for the center came, had been an enterprise which had been evolving over many years. From an original focus on mining and mining engineering it moved into metallurgy and materials science, evolving more and more sophisticated capabilities for dealing with materials and of course all the while engaged in not only research of traditional materials but also the development of new materials. This was a period in which people like John Slater in physics, Morris Cohen and Nick Grant in metallurgy and others were carrying on a tradition that laid the groundwork for new fields of research by reaching out to the edges of the field and extending them. It was in that context, in the late '50s, that Professors Cohen and Grant, aware of the Advanced Research Projects Agency's (ARPA) interest in seeking out proposals for new areas of research that might relate to ARPA's interests in new materials, proposed that MIT should develop a center that would enable MIT to initiate an integrated program that would bring together the interests of faculty members in materials science, physics, and electrical engineering. This kind of initiative was not a new phenomenon, many of these same people had worked together during the Second World War developing materials and technology for the war effort. The development of radar and other wartime scientific accomplishments required similar interdisciplinary collaborative efforts.

Arne Hessenbruch

Particularly the Radiation Laboratory?

Bob Simha

Yes, the Rad Lab was perhaps the best example of that and so this proposed materials laboratory was a natural extension of the idea of an integrated research laboratory that brought together a variety of disciplines. They made this proposal to Chancellor Julius A. Stratton who would soon become MIT's President. The vice-president for research at that time was a man named Carl Flow, a professor in Materials Science, or the Metallurgy Department, as it was then called. Carl Flow and the director of our Division of Sponsored Research, Leroy Foster, put together a draft proposal for the center. The following year the director of ARPA wrote to Dr. Stratton, who was by then President of MIT, inviting him to make a focused proposal for such a center. There of course had been many conversations going back and forth that laid the groundwork for this - these things don't just come out of the air. Stratton responded positively, expressing the view that MIT felt an obligation and an interest in pursuing this kind of enterprise. Dr. Flow and Dr. Foster, himself a former faculty member, submitted the proposal. The proposal was accepted by ARPA and the initiation of a project that would ultimately become Building 13 began. Originally it was a more ambitious project, one that would initially serve materials science but that would be built in such a fashion that additional floors could be added which would be used for some of the other areas of interest - communications science and so on. These were currently housed in Building 20 under the administrative umbrella of the Research Laboratory for Electronics - one of the successors to the Rad Lab. Ultimately the funds available and the interest in materials research focused on the Materials Science Building, one that would bring together the three principal departments - Materials, Physics and Electrical Engineering - and some others as well. I think there were some other people from chemistry involved as well.

This building project along with several others were designated in the campus plan for an area we then called the North Campus, or the area north of Building 10, the location of the great MIT dome. And while there were several ideas about how it should be designed and how it should be sited, the task of preparing the design for this sector of the campus was given to the Chicago office of the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Walter Netch, an MIT alumnus, was the principal design partner of the firm's Chicago office and he recommended the arrangement which we now see. It featured a building for materials science that would be directly attached to the original main buildings in a way that would allow it to help shape a new landscaped courtyard. The Materials building would connect to all of the principle existing buildings and would allow for future expansion to the East. The physical and intellectual plan for the building continued to be driven by people in materials science like Grant and Cohen and people in physics that were equally interested in materials, such as physicist John Slater, who had a great history of work in crystallography. There were also people from Electrical Engineering who came to join the enterprise. The building lay-out was planned in a rather interesting way, there were a lot of ideas that were kicking around but I would say that the principle idea for the layout of the building came from the architects and from Slater who was entranced with a particular arrangement he had seen at other places, both in Pennsylvania and in New York. This plan laid out the laboratories in the center of the building and the office spaces and other supporting facilities on the periphery of the building. That had implications for the kind of communication that would occur in the building. It meant that while it provided enormous flexibility with respect to the laboratory layout because the laboratories could be changed in terms of size and shape and could still retain access to central service shafts, the width of the building, 90 feet, required that there be two corridors. This, in contrast to the traditional 60-foot wide MIT buildings which had a single, double-loaded common corridor where you always had to go when you left your lab or office. This plan encouraged serendipitous connections with other people. In the new Materials building plan you had a split system in which people could have more privacy, but probably have less physical contact and less visual contact with the larger community.

Arne Hessenbruch

Why can't you have a ring?

Bob Simha

Well, the building's floor plan actually forms a ring. But people don't move in rings, they move, usually, from their automobile, to their laboratory or office and then back out to lunch or to the W.C. or to some other destination. Much of what happens at MIT that has traditionally been interesting is the kind of intellectual connections that occur from casual encounters, set off by seeing people coming back and forth along the public corridors.

Arne Hessenbruch

What is the history of that? I guess that if we start off with an industrial, not very attractive campus then that must have been developed in - what - in the '40s perhaps? In the '50s this ... shall we call philosophy of MIT?

Bob Simha

This philosophy actually underpins the design of the original buildings here in Cambridge that were designed in 1911 and built between 1914 and 1916. And they emerged from a philosophy - an institutional philosophy in place from the very beginning in the first building in Boston in which all of MIT's academic activities were housed. There was a grand staircase in the original William Barton Rogers building, as was the style at that time. It served as a common center for all. But under it all what you see is the simple reflection of Rogers' ideas that provided the basis for the creation of MIT. He wanted to have an institution where there was a very keen connection between practical application of scientific and engineering principles and he knew that it was the interaction of people representing different disciplines in what they then called natural sciences and engineering that would continually launch new possibilities and new ideas. That was the case for a while in the original buildings in Copley Square but that began to fall apart as the institute expanded into separate buildings located throughout the Back Bay. When it came time to move to a new campus in Cambridge, the people who were planning and designing the new buildings were aware of the fact that there had been a fracture in this ideal and so the buildings that were planned here were planned to restore the possibilities that had existed in the original Rogers building and that were fundamental to the philosophy of the institution. They understood that MIT had an obligation to encourage research and development across discipline lines and that the way to do that would not be to compartmentalize academic units in separate buildings but to house them all under one roof and to allow the buildings to expand organically allowing the activities in the buildings to expand and contract as the natural flow of intellectual activity emerged. This was the guiding principle behind the design of the original buildings and continued all the way through, well, almost to the current time.

Arne Hessenbruch

You described the priorities defined in the '40s and the '50s of where the institute should go. Is what you just mentioned related to that?

Bob Simha

Oh yes, the intellectual agenda counted on this kind of continuity because the people who had prepared that agenda for the future were all beneficiaries of that environment and recognized perhaps more than anybody else how productive it had been in providing for an environment in which people could be stimulated by one another. John Slater is a good example. This is a man who was appointed at the age of 30 as the youngest head of the Physics Department. He already had a reputation in the field of crystallography. He was appointed by President Karl Compton, who as a physicist himself had a sense of the importance of this area of physics and its potential connections with other fields. Slater working with chemists on one side, electrical engineers on the other, was able to make a significant contribution to the development of the materials technology for electronics. One might ask, would that have happened as easily if he were not just down the hall, from other disciplines but in another building someplace. At MIT there was a keen understanding of the fact that the ease of physical access was a key to the creative processes and the entrepreneurial spirit that characterizes MIT and that it was established to preserve and expand.

Arne Hessenbruch

The ARPA program for interdisciplinary laboratories in materials science seems to have had very much the same kind of philosophy - it's very important to get people in different disciplines to get together and collaborate, so it seems that the MIT philosophy would fit very neatly with the ARPA intentions. And then, it sounds almost ironic if the architecture of Building 13 failed to do that.

Bob Simha

Well, it didn't fail completely, it was something of a minor aberration. After all, everyone has to go to the same elevator core and the service facilities are all located in the center, so to some degree, you always have some kind of interaction, but it's an example of where, in the desire to pursue some advantages in laboratory organization, there's a danger of losing another value, or at least losing a part of another value. It's what one always has to be aware of in the design of buildings that are driven by a particular faculty. They will try to optimize their own concerns and sub-optimize the institutional or community concerns. Unless they have a sense of commitment to the institution beyond their own discipline and also see that their own advantage is pursued by having a more flexible environment so that when they need to expand or when their success can be capitalized on, they haven't created artificial barriers to that expansion and to that additional success. And that's I think, the traditional conflict between the human potential or the human tendency to optimize their local situation because they fear that they may never have another chance to influence their environment. Also, for many academic folks erecting a building is a once-in-a-lifetime event and they feel keenly that they should optimize their particular interest and perspective. The idea to remember, of course, is that in science and engineering, change is a natural result of the very work of these communities. It requires almost constant modification of the environment or at least updating in a fairly regular cycle. If you look back at the history of space changes and research program changes in a typical department you'll see that, particularly in engineering, it goes through a very interesting cycle of changes which in detail are quite radical, but in general are not at all that extraordinary if the buildings are designed to accept change seamlessly. Where a building is tailor-made for very special purposes, the building almost invariably cannot be economically modified or changed and then it usually has to be torn down in order to accommodate some new enterprise.

Arne Hessenbruch

And Building 13?

Bob Simha

I think Building 13 falls into what I would call the middle of this field. It has been successful for many people, particularly for the laboratory groupings which are willing to put up with some of the less advantageous office and community design features in the building. I think that one thing that will change with respect to the general circulation through the building, because it's kind of an isolated building, a sort of cul-de-sac now, is when the building is extended and, as was originally planned, connected to Building 16. It will then be on the principle path of east-west movement and it will then become a new way for people to circulate across the campus. As a result people in the building will see other people, will have more and easier ways to get to other destinations, and will probably experience general accessibility to other parts of the campus. Some people will see that as a negative because of the loss of privacy and intimacy. But MIT has always found that it's best interests were served by encouraging buildings which had easy communication. Those buildings have always been the most successful ones at MIT. And so I think Building 13, while there were a number of, let's say, difficulties, in making decisions about how it should be built, in the long term it should be able to overcome those limitations and be a reasonably successful place.

Arne Hessenbruch

These circulations across the campus happen on the ground floor.

Bob Simha

Yes, and they also happen on the upper levels.

Arne Hessenbruch

Well, not through the infinite corridor - not for east-west circulation on campus.

Legend: The infinite corridor

Legend: central part of MIT campus. The MIT dome is on top of Building 10; the Charles River is at the bottom of the picture. The infinite corridor runs along Buildings 7, 3, 10, 4, and 8.

Bob Simha

The academic buildings, that is, the original buildings all do that. There are some interruptions here and there. The plan for the campus was to extend that system all the way from Massachusetts Avenue to the east campus. In fact all these bridges that you see are essentially elements of that plan. On the main campus we didn't have to deal with public ways needing to be bridged, but passages were left at the ground floor for emergency circulation and service. The idea of continuity and horizontal circulation has a been a goal for a long time and has been executed to a very large degree as buildings were built from 1960 on. The newer buildings that were built in this period were all driven by the central ideal that our buildings should be, in a sense, intellectually transparent - that an activity, an intellectual activity may have a lifecycle, it may grow and be vigorous and so on and then die off and be replaced by something else and that the space should be able to accommodate those changes. The materials science building is a good example of that tradition and I think in the main it will probably succeed in accomplishing that goal and I think perhaps it will do even better when it's connected to Building 4 and Building 16.

Arne Hessenbruch

What about the vertical arrangement of Building 13?

Bob Simha

Well, the vertical arrangement had a peculiar history in that the architect for the building, Walter Netsch, didn't like elevators - he's a very tall person and he said that he felt, as he used to say, "encapsulated" by elevators so he proposed that the original building use escalators for vertical circulation. That proved to be really quite unwieldy in terms of moving equipment and we discovered that even the smallest escalator had far in excess capacity for the number of people who actually wanted to go up and down in that building. So we finally got him to change and specify elevators, but he really didn't want to do that, he liked the idea of rising up un-encapsulated. That's an example of where you have a strong personal view about how things should be. Mr. Netsch thought Building 13 would become a major entrance to the Institute but this was not to be. The building is not actually occupied by a whole lot of people, that is, the density of Building 13 isn't very great, so the amount of vertical circulation required is modest. But the connections from Building 13 to adjacent buildings are very important because it allows the rest of the institute to access the building and vice versa. Its one elevator core at the center of the building encourages everyone entering the building to come to that lobby and then go up and circulate to whatever destination they have on the upper floors of the building. That means that the Building 13 residents are more likely to see people, rather than not. If there were many elevator cores in the building you would reduce the amount of visibility that people would have with one another, so I think, in that sense, the arrangement works reasonably well.

Arne Hessenbruch

Was it planned that each floor should have its own discipline; let's say the electrical engineers on one floor, the metallurgists on another floor, and so on and so forth?

Bob Simha

Well, it's gone back and forth over time as the functionality required, with the expectation that the community would utilize a set of social devices to mitigate any social and intellectual isolation, so the Center's colloquia and other activities would certainly contribute to a mixing of the disciplines. There have been concentrations on each floor, but I think they're not exclusive. I think it is a function of the practical dynamics of space allocation.

Arne Hessenbruch

To some extent, the ARPA program wanted to have people from different disciplines using the same facilities - and instrumentation, and that would mix people around floors.

Bob Simha

Yes. And that did happen - it does happen. There are some common research facilities, special equipment, things like that whose justification required that they be usable by a variety of researchers and to some degree that has worked out.

Arne Hessenbruch

You point out in the book that the basement wasn't really built out and it was for financial reasons, but that might have helped in some respects with some of the social organization would it not?

Bob Simha

It certainly would have, I think one of the results of the decision not to build a full basement meant that a very large proportion of the ground floor of the building was devoted to mechanical activities rather than to public activities. So the only public space in that building is the lobby and the lobby is rather cold and architecturally uncomfortable. That doesn't mean it couldn't be more comfortable but the way it was designed and furnished leaves much to be desired in terms of warmth But, yes, the real impact was that the ground floor which is occupied by mechanical activities might have been developed for many more public functions - classrooms, common rooms, things like that. That would certainly have enhanced the quality of life in the building as well as for that part of the institute. A good example of what could have occurred in Building 13 is in the Biology Building where you see on the ground floor administrative activities, reception activities and a large sub-dividable common room and a cafe. These were actually intended in the materials building but by virtue of the practical situation faced at that time were deferred until the design of the expansion of Building 13 could be undertaken.

Arne Hessenbruch

It was money based really, wasn't it?

Bob Simha

Yes. And to some degree some technical concerns about what deep foundations might do to the potential subsidence of the adjacent buildings. Ultimately we discovered that it was possible to control those things, but it was certainly one of the considerations that pushed us in a particular direction. After all, we really couldn't have a situation in which we were building one building at the expense of another. As it turned out, the foundation issue was not as serious a problem as was anticipated.

Arne Hessenbruch

What was your personal role in this, it seems to me from your description now that, generally speaking, you were mediating between a great many institutions: Cambridge, various departments, architecture companies, the administration and so on. You are talking about the art of getting something done with many different interests involved. What was your role particularly with Building 13? And could you also say something about the timing of this - some of the developments you describe must have taken place before you arrived on the scene, right?

Bob Simha

Well, most of the proposal work was in play when I came. The design work, the commissioning of the architects, the writing of the program activities, coordination with the city and so on did occur during my period of responsibility. My job, really, was to ensure that the building was built in a manner which contributed not only to its intellectual success but also to the creation of a new environment for that part of the campus. An area which really had been the back yard and where all the detritus of the research activities and some administrative activities occurred. That's where the wooden buildings that went back to 1914 housed parts of the Physical Plant Department. That's where wooden buildings built during the War to house specific war research activities were located. One or two buildings that were more permanent in character were located there, but it was for all intents and purposes, the place where you put things that you really couldn't fit into the original buildings. And my job was to convert that into a new ideal entrance to the institute.

We also changed the way in which people accessed MIT by vehicle. Before this plan was made and executed, people would drive into an MIT parking lot from Massachusetts Avenue. That was the principle way in which a visitor and many faculty members arrived at MIT. As we closed the Massachusetts Avenue entrance and moved it around to Vassar Street, we created a new entrance way, a new portal to MIT. The planning office's job, and my job specifically, was to ensure that over time, this plan got executed in a way which completed this idealized view of how this area should look and how it should feel. We planned for it to be transformed from a relatively rude collection of disparate buildings into a handsome landscaped courtyard with the wooden temporary buildings eliminated and new buildings added. One of our goals was to utilize our land more intensively in order to minimize the amount of physical expansion into the city. That was a very important goal, and controlling the development took a great deal of coordination since each building in the North court represented a different constituency who wanted to optimize their particular needs. Much of the planner's role here was to ensure that the ultimate common design goal is always kept in front of people and that the necessary arrangements that are made for each building project are done in a way which is congenial to the users, but also congenial to the institution's long-term goal. In this area there were many quite serious complicated problems of access, of transparency, and of connectivity that resulted from the peculiar juxtaposition of building elements. Also, it was our job to make sure that as the ground rules changed, we were able to reconfigure the plan to make sure that the basic goals would not get lost. We focused on trying to find solutions that would accommodate changing circumstances of the particular needs of the faculty, but without compromising the longer-term goals. This area was a difficult one because there were so many existing special purpose buildings, many of which had to be demolished. The people in them had to be relocated, accommodations for them had to be prepared and paid for and only then would you have the opportunity to take a step in the direction of creating the kind of environment which we had hoped would be created here that would turn it from a backyard into a pleasant and visually supportive environment. That is, in effect, the definition of the planner's job, to pull the various development interests together into a coherent picture and to hold it together while each individual decision is made so that it all ends up as something that you can look back on and say, well this is what we tried to accomplish and, although the road was crooked, this is how we actually accomplished MIT's goal of creating a first-rate environment for learning. Achieving this is a difficult problem at a place like MIT because there are enormous pressures for people to focus only on their interests, and not on the larger campus goals. Building the Materials Center, Building 13, involved all of these issues and the role of a planner was challenging every step of the way.

Arne Hessenbruch

Would you tell us a little about your own background?

Bob Simha

Well, I'm a city person. I grew up in New York City, so I know what city density looks like, what it feels like, and how exciting it can be. Also, how valuable open spaces are. I grew up next to a university. It was then the uptown campus of New York University. It was quite bucolic up in the Bronx, at the time, and "University Heights" as it was called provided a rather interesting introduction to institutions - I always remember the many pleasant places on the campus. In one sense that was a good preparation for my professional work. But living in the city and enjoying, as I do, its intensity is not unlike living and working at MIT where life goes on 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. We don't have as many amenities as the city and we don't have as much tension, although we do have plenty of that. One of the things that, I think a city planner with this kind of background brings to the work is the notion that places can be more interesting and exciting within the context of a structure - an urban structure. We see opportunities where others don't see them, because you have a larger, historical context to draw on. In addition, when I finished my studies here at MIT I did some additional post-graduate work in the Netherlands where my appreciation for urban life was reinforced. I found that in Holland whose urban pattern is very concentrated and where, over a long period of time, the Dutch have figured out how to deal with city building in a way that is very economical with land. They are clever and resourceful in the way they create amenities that make these cities beautiful. I have tried to employ all of these experiences in my professional work here and I think the combination of New York and Holland have given me a lot of understanding about how highly concentrated communities can work successfully and what they need to make them successful. And I think my professional responsibilities profited from that experience. MIT is not an isolated institution, we're very much part of the fabric of this city and there are different ways to be a part of that fabric that can be congenial. It takes a certain positive and optimistic perspective to plan for this special place. The Center for Materials Science and Engineering is still a work in progress, and an exciting one at that. Ultimately it will fulfill its promise as an important part of the MIT plan.

Arne Hessenbruch

Thank you very much!

This page was written and last updated on 19 October 2002 by Arne Hessenbruch.