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Architecture - MIT Builds Its Dream House

By Fred Hapgood

May 15, 2004 — CIO — It’s a few days before the big March move and Jack Costanza squats and touches the inside of a large black optical switch, a "collapse point" that will act more or less like a router. "See this?" he says, holding up his finger. There it was. A little white smudge of plaster dust. On the tip of the $100,000 switch, it would, according to Costanza, seriously compromise the equipment’s performance. "This tells me I have a lot more shouting to do," he says.

Costanza is being facetious. He doesn’t shout; he has a quiet, bemused air that says, in effect, "Problem? What problem?"

But problems abound. MIT’s computer science labs are moving into a new building?the hypermodern, $285 million, 719,000-square-foot Ray and Maria Stata Center designed by architect Frank Gehry. And for the close to 1,000 teachers, students, researchers and support staff working in dozens of groups representing fields ranging from robotics to biological computing, the new building is drastically different from the only labs most of them have ever known. And hardly any of the solutions, relationships and customs of the past can be taken with them. Everything has to be made new, and all these new systems have to mesh.

As director of IT for the newly formed Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), Costanza owns a major piece of the move. Networks are mission-critical in any organization, but considering the nature of the CSAIL labs (ubiquitous computing, advanced network architectures, parallelized operating systems and more), given a choice between having the walls up or the network up, everybody here would pick the latter. After all, if a chilly wind blows, you can always wear a sweater. But if Costanza can’t deliver a functional network on moving day, there’s just no point in moving. And he’s not going to be able to deliver if construction grit keeps drifting into his switches.

Of course, networks move all the time. But in this case the stakes are unusually high. Engineering has passed through two major intellectual renovations over the course of the past 150 years, and MIT has led both of them. Part of that leadership was defining the architecture that supported each vision. The building Costanza is moving his network into reflects the Institute’s belief that a third engineering renovation is sweeping the technosphere. If MIT is right, a lot of us might be moving into buildings much like the Stata Center in the years to come. If not, if the building doesn’t work, if, instead, it gets in people’s way...

 

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