Simmons Hall, MIT Campus Poster

Architect Steven Holl, in collaboration with Perry Dean Rogers Architects, has created an interior, punctuated by atriums and terraces, that is open to light and air. The shimmering exterior is wrapped in windows connected by a grid of anodized aluminum. As a result, the building reflects light during the day and glows with interior light after dark. Even before the groundbreaking, the design for Simmons Hall was recognized by Progressive Architecture for the inventive ways it opens to the community. The 10-story dormitory accommodates 350 undergraduates, faculty housemasters, visiting scholars, and graduate assistants, and includes a computer cluster, a fitness centre, music practice room, game room, multipurpose room, coffee station, and street-level dining room with open-air seating. Recipient of the 2003 AIA Honour Awards for Architecture, the jury touted Simmons Hall as "a project of enormous power, it questions the urban landscape at the same moment that it questions normative ideas of interior space making. Appropriate to an institution of higher learning, this exploration clearly locates architecture within the realm of the intellectual pursuit. A bold revision of compositional and construction norms in American campus housing." Simmons Hall is named in honour of Richard P. Simmons (Class of 1953), his late wife Dorothy, and their family in recognition of their major support of student life and campus activities at MIT.