Stata Center
…or one of my most favorite haunts in the world. In its previous avatar it was Building 20, MIT’s Magic Incubator, now home to CSAIL. I have often wondered about why the Linguistics Department was housed there along with Computer Science and AI. Finally found the answer in “GroupThink” a Jonah Lehrer article from the New Yorker.
“In the spring of 1942, it became clear that the Radiation Laboratory at M.I.T.—the main radar research institute for the Allied war effort—needed more space. The Rad Lab had been developing a radar device for fighter aircraft that would allow pilots to identify distant German bombers, and was hiring hundreds of scientists every few months. The proposed new structure, known as Building 20, was going to be the biggest lab yet, comprising two hundred and fifty thousand square feet, on three floors. It was designed in an afternoon by a local architecture firm, and construction was quick and cheap. The design featured a wooden frame on top of a concrete-slab foundation, with an exterior covered in gray asbestos shingles. (Steel was in short supply.) The structure violated the Cambridge fire code, but it was granted an exemption because of its temporary status. M.I.T. promised to demolish Building 20 shortly after the war.
Initially, Building 20 was regarded as a failure. Ventilation was poor and hallways were dim. The walls were thin, the roof leaked, and the building was broiling in the summer and freezing in the winter. Nevertheless, Building 20 quickly became a center of groundbreaking research, the Los Alamos of the East Coast, celebrated for its important work on military radar. Within a few years, the lab developed radar systems used for naval navigation, weather prediction, and the detection of bombers and U-boats. According to a 1945 statement issued by the Defense Department, the Rad Lab “pushed research in this field ahead by at least 25 normal peacetime years.” If the atom bomb ended the war, radar is what won it.
Immediately after the surrender of Japan, M.I.T., as it had promised, began making plans for the demolition of Building 20. The Rad Lab offices were dismantled and the radio towers on the roof were taken down. But the influx of students after the G.I. Bill suddenly left M.I.T. desperately short of space. Building 20 was turned into offices for scientists who had nowhere else to go.
The first division to move into Building 20 was the Research Laboratory of Electronics, which grew directly out of the Rad Lab. Because the electrical engineers needed only a fraction of the structure, M.I.T. began shifting a wide variety of academic departments and student clubs to the so-called “plywood palace.” By the nineteen-fifties, Building 20 was home to the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, the Linguistics Department, and the machine shop. There was a particle accelerator, the R.O.T.C., a piano repair facility, and a cell-culture lab.
Building 20 became a strange, chaotic domain, full of groups who had been thrown together by chance and who knew little about one another’s work. And yet, by the time it was finally demolished, in 1998, Building 20 had become a legend of innovation, widely regarded as one of the most creative spaces in the world. In the postwar decades, scientists working there pioneered a stunning list of breakthroughs, from advances in high-speed photography to the development of the physics behind microwaves. Building 20 served as an incubator for the Bose Corporation. It gave rise to the first video game and to Chomskyan linguistics. Stewart Brand, in his study “How Buildings Learn,” cites Building 20 as an example of a “Low Road” structure, a type of space that is unusually creative because it is so unwanted and under-designed. (Another example is the Silicon Valley garage.) As a result, scientists in Building 20 felt free to remake their rooms, customizing the structure to fit their needs. Walls were torn down without permission; equipment was stored in the courtyards and bolted to the roof. When Jerrold Zacharias was developing the first atomic clock, working in Building 20, he removed two floors in his lab to make room for a three-story metal cylinder.
The space also forced solitary scientists to mix and mingle. Although the rushed wartime architects weren’t thinking about the sweet spot of Q or the importance of physical proximity when they designed the structure, they conjured up a space that maximized both of these features, allowing researchers to take advantage of Building 20’s intellectual diversity.
Room numbers, for instance, followed an inscrutable scheme: rooms on the second floor were given numbers beginning with 1, and third-floor room numbers began with 2. Furthermore, the wings that made up the building were named in an unclear sequence: B wing gave onto A wing, followed by E, D, and C wings. Even longtime residents of Building 20 were constantly getting lost, wandering the corridors in search of rooms. Those looking for the Ice Research Lab had to walk past the military recruiting office; students on their way to play with the toy trains (the Tech Model Railroad Club was on the third floor, in Room No. 20E-214) strolled along hallways filled with the latest computing experiments.
The building’s horizontal layout also spurred interaction. Brand quotes Henry Zimmerman, an electrical engineer who worked there for years: “In a vertical layout with small floors, there is less research variety on each floor. Chance meetings in an elevator tend to terminate in the lobby, whereas chance meetings in a corridor tended to lead to technical discussions.” The urban theorist Jane Jacobs described such incidental conversations as “knowledge spillovers.” Her favorite example was the rise of the automobile industry in Detroit. In the eighteen-twenties, the city was full of small shipyards built for the flour trade. Over time, the shipyards became centers of expertise in the internal-combustion engine. Nearly a century later, those engines proved ideal for powering cars, which is why many pioneers of the automotive industry got their start building ships. Jacobs’s point was that the unpredictable nature of innovation meant that it couldn’t be prescribed in advance.
Building 20 was full of knowledge spillovers. Take the career of Amar Bose. In the spring of 1956, Bose, a music enthusiast, procrastinating in writing his dissertation, decided to buy a hi-fi. He chose the system with the best technical specs, but found that the speakers sounded terrible. Bose realized that the science of hi-fi needed help and began frequenting the Acoustics Lab, which was just down the hall. Before long, Bose was spending more time playing with tweeters than he was on his dissertation. Nobody minded the interloper in the lab, and, three years later, Bose produced a wedge-shaped contraption outfitted with twenty-two speakers, a synthesis of his time among the engineers and his musical sensibility. The Bose Corporation was founded soon afterward.
A similar lesson emerges from the Linguistics Department at M.I.T., which was founded by Morris Halle, in the early fifties. According to Halle, he was assigned to Building 20 because that was the least valuable real estate on campus, and nobody thought much of linguists. Nevertheless, he soon grew fond of the building, if only because he was able to tear down several room dividers. This allowed Halle to transform a field that was often hermetic, with grad students working alone in the library, into a group exercise, characterized by discussion, Socratic interrogation, and the vigorous exchange of clashing perspectives. “At Building 20, we made a big room, so that all of the students could talk to each other,” Halle remembers. “That’s how I wanted them to learn.”
One of Halle’s first recruits was Carol Chomsky, a young scholar who was married to a Harvard grad student named Noam Chomsky, also a linguist. Halle encouraged Chomsky to apply for an open position at M.I.T., and in 1955 he joined the linguistics faculty at Building 20. For the next several decades, Halle and Chomsky worked in adjacent offices, which were recalled by a colleague as “the two most miserable holes in the whole place.” Although the men studied different aspects of language—Chomsky focused on syntax and grammar, and Halle analyzed the sounds of words—the men spent much of their day talking about their work. “We became great friends,” Halle says. “And friends shouldn’t be shy about telling each other when they are wrong. What am I supposed to do? Not tell him he’s got a bad idea?”
After a few years at M.I.T., Chomsky revolutionized the study of linguistics by proposing that every language shares a “deep structure,” which reflects the cognitive structures of the mind. Chomsky’s work drew from disparate fields—biology, psychology, and computer science. At the time, the fields seemed to have nothing in common—except the hallways of Building 20. “Building 20 was a fantastic environment,” Chomsky says. “It looked like it was going to fall apart. But it was extremely interactive.” He went on, “There was a mixture of people who later became separate departments interacting informally all the time. You would walk down the corridor and meet people and have a discussion.”
Building 20 and brainstorming came into being at almost exactly the same time. In the sixty years since then, if the studies are right, brainstorming has achieved nothing—or, at least, less than would have been achieved by six decades’ worth of brainstormers working quietly on their own. Building 20, though, ranks as one of the most creative environments of all time, a space with an almost uncanny ability to extract the best from people. Among M.I.T. people, it was referred to as “the magical incubator.”
The fatal misconception behind brainstorming is that there is a particular script we should all follow in group interactions. The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right—enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways—the group dynamic will take care of itself. All these errant discussions add up. In fact, they may even be the most essential part of the creative process. Although such conversations will occasionally be unpleasant—not everyone is always in the mood for small talk or criticism—that doesn’t mean that they can be avoided. The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together. It is the human friction that makes the sparks. ♦