Last time I checked, which was a few years ago but quite some time after the creation of CSAIL, Switzerland was going strong. Last tidbit was their dismay to discover the very high ceiling of the space they were in was a couple or three inches too short per Cambridge zoning rules to subdivide into 2 levels.
BTW, it's really hard to understate how horrible a building the Strata Center is for the people inside it who are, you know, trying to get work done, in fact, it's akin and often directly an example of the current open office fad.
Or for people trying to get to them, due to it's inherently horrible physical security. In terms of sheer incompetence, though, it's hard to beat creating a loading dock area for mail and freight to replace Building 20's modest facilities that trucks can't actually get into and out of....
After blowing most of almost half a billion on it, MIT has a lot of nerve asking for more money for more buildings.
Disclaimer: big fan of Building 20, which served as an indispensable incubator, and allowed me to set up a student run computer center in 1980, there's no place else in the Institute where that would have been vaguely easy, or probably even possible.
Yeah, it was a nightmare to maintain, and occupied very valuable space on campus, but there's no excuse for not creating another space to serve the same function, modulo the ease of knocking vertical or horizontal holes, and its extremely high load bearing capability (200 lb/sq ft as I recall). MIT simply won't be creating new groups of people in new fields as fast as it used to.
BTW, it's really hard to understate how horrible a building the Strata Center is for the people inside it who are, you know, trying to get work done, in fact, it's akin and often directly an example of the current open office fad.
Or for people trying to get to them, due to it's inherently horrible physical security. In terms of sheer incompetence, though, it's hard to beat creating a loading dock area for mail and freight to replace Building 20's modest facilities that trucks can't actually get into and out of....
After blowing most of almost half a billion on it, MIT has a lot of nerve asking for more money for more buildings.
Disclaimer: big fan of Building 20, which served as an indispensable incubator, and allowed me to set up a student run computer center in 1980, there's no place else in the Institute where that would have been vaguely easy, or probably even possible.
Yeah, it was a nightmare to maintain, and occupied very valuable space on campus, but there's no excuse for not creating another space to serve the same function, modulo the ease of knocking vertical or horizontal holes, and its extremely high load bearing capability (200 lb/sq ft as I recall). MIT simply won't be creating new groups of people in new fields as fast as it used to.