Designing MIT

"Chartered in 1861, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lay in financial crisis with an assortment of laboratories classrooms, offices, and student facilities scattered across Boston's Back Bay by the turn of the century. But in 1912, backed by some of the country's leading financiers and industrialists, MIT officials purchased an undeveloped tract of land in Cambridge, launching a long and complex review of proposals for a new quadrangle. Largely on the basis of the recommendation of John D. Rockefeller Jr., the commission was awarded to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts-trained architect William Welles Bosworth, known for his AT & T Building in Manhattan and Kykuit, the Rockefeller mansion in Tarrytown, New York." "Designing MIT is the first book to detail Bosworth's challenges in the planning and construction of the Institute's unique Cambridge campus. Beginning with an examination of the competing project proposals - from Steven Child, an emerging landscape designer and student of Frederick Law Olmsted; Desire Despradelle, chairman of the Department of Architecture at MIT and a leading Beaux-Arts stylist; Ralph Adams Cram, noted for his gothic West Point campus; and John Freeman,