Cambridge, MA – In the mid 1990’s MIT engaged world famous Pritzker Prize winner Fumihiko Maki to design an extension to the Media Lab, one of the world’s top visual media research facilities. The design by Mr. Maki was to express this statement and provide a ‘vessel’ for the Lab’s programs and its exciting research. Earlier in the past decade the project started and then halted during the economic ‘dot-com’ bust. In 2007, BOND was eventually selected by MIT to construct the landmark building.
Recently, BOND completed the MIT Media Lab Extension, which is located adjacent to and connected to the existing Media Lab that was designed by I.M. Pei in the 1980s. Fumihiko Maki & Associates of Tokyo, Japan, in association with Leers, Weinzapfel Associates of Boston and other regional engineers and consultants collaborated with BOND and dozens of the best subcontractors in the marketplace to create this masterpiece. It has been called “the world’s most exquisite building” by Robert Campbell, architecture critic for the Boston Globe (12.06.09).
The Media Lab is home to the School of Architecture’s Design Lab and Center for Advanced Visual Studies, the Department of Architecture’s Visual Arts Program, the List Visual Arts Center and the Comparative Media Studies program, as well as the Okawa Center for Future Children.
The building consists of 163,000 square feet, and is organized around two interior atria. From these interior light filled spaces one can see into seven different laboratories where some of the most exciting research and creative innovations take place. The entire building is assembled like a watch – every component is perfectly matched to another with great precision and delicacy.
According to Alan Steinberg, LEED AP, BOND’s project executive, “Building a Japanese designed structure in the US is extremely complicated; details that are fairly common in that country are actually quite challenging in the American building environment. Minute tolerances, exacting reveals, multiple trade interfaces and assemblies added a great deal of coordination. The entire process was both gratifying and challenging for our subcontractors and the BOND team.”
Every facet of the project was complicated, from the foundations on up. Bill Cunniff, LEED AP, senior project manager describes what it was like to place a foundation essentially underwater, as the building is close to the Charles River.
“The building foundation is designed as a reinforced concrete mat slab. The surrounding water table is about twelve feet higher than the basement slab, so the building displaces about 2.5 million gallons of water. We placed a 4-foot thick mat slab that provided much needed ballast to offset buoyancy – we also needed to run dewatering pumps for over a year until the 4th floor slab was placed, in order to balance hydrostatic pressures.”
As Cunniff also noted, “Joe Pryse and Vaughn Miller of Leers Weinzapfel were instrumental in balancing the design intent and the actual materials we were working with”. In addition, “Peter Quigley of Weidlinger Associates (structural engineers) was great to work with as we integrated the structural system with numerous project components – lighting, mechanicals, all designed in precise symmetry and patterns.”
The building also contains a very complex curtainwall system provided by Karas & Karas and supplied by Schuco, a German manufacturer. The components were fabricated in North Carolina and shipped to the site where they had to be erected in harmony with aluminum panels from Doralco in Chicago. The entire system was actually performance tested in a mock-up erected in Miami, FL in early 2008 before being placed on the structure by Karas & Karas over the next year.
As its name implies, media played a huge role in the project. Literally hundreds of miles of CAT6 and laser-optimized fiber-optic cable were placed throughout the laboratories, classrooms, assembly areas and ‘public’ spaces. The placement of these cables within trench ducts throughout the building required precise coordination with the steel erector; in fact the raceways were laid out by a registered surveyor, so tight were the tolerances.
Precision extends into the exterior spaces as well; landscape elements are placed in an exacting order, and the main feature is a low curving wall that is made of highly-finished concrete located in the courtyard.
As Robert Murray, president of BOND noted, “We have had the pleasure and challenge of working with many world-class designers and for the region’s best clients, and this experience is one of the greatest in the 103-year history of our firm. We hope to bring our team of professionals and our knowledge to other exciting project like the MIT Media Lab in the future”.
By: Marc Pelletier, Dir. of Client Services at Bond Brothers
