Confession time! I’ve never been the type of person to get hung up on college degrees. Yes, you basically have to have one these days, I know. Have one from Harvard? Neat. It won’t really win you any extra points with me (not that you’d likely care, if you had said degree).
I say all that, of course, with one giant exception. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a tech guy, I’ve always been super impressed with MIT and all the crazy technology advances that come from there. If budget weren’t an issue (or my high school GPA), and I could have gone to any school on the planet… that’s where I would have gone. So, as you would imagine, when I got the chance to visit Boston earlier this year, visiting MIT was right at the top of my list.
In addition to the cool technology at MIT, they also have some interesting architecture on campus as well. The image above hasn’t been tweaked in some strange way… that’s how Building 32 actually looks! Formally the Ray and Maria Stata Center (buildings on MIT’s campus are generally just referred to by their number), it was built in a “deconstructivist” style, meaning it looks totally random and perhaps like it is falling apart. To me it looked like something out of a Dr. Seuss book! This is definitely the type of place I could have spent hours with my camera as the angles and compositions seemed endless. So much fun!
Getting there proved to be entertaining as well. When I got off the T at the Kendall / MIT station, I’m not sure what I was expecting. I walked up out of the subway and looked around… surrounded by a bunch of nondescript buildings. I had no idea where I was going. A gentleman happened to be walking by as I was looking around and so I asked how to get to MIT, to which he replied “You’re here!”. Turns out not ALL of the buildings on the MIT campus are neat looking… only some of them. 🙂
–Dan Thompson