Baker House Baker House, located at 362 Memorial Drive, is a co-ed dormitory at
MIT designed by the Finnish architect
Alvar Aalto in 1947–1948 and built in 1949. Its distinctive design has an undulating shape which allows most rooms a view of the
Charles River, and the dining hall features a "
moon garden" roof. Aalto also designed custom furniture for the building's rooms, many of which are wedge-shaped. Baker House was renovated for its fiftieth anniversary in 1999, modernizing the plumbing, telecommunications, and electrical systems and removing some of the interior changes made over the years that were not in Aalto's original design. Baker House celebrated its 75th Anniversary in 2024 with over 382 house alumni in attendance. The dormitory was named after Everett Moore Baker, an MIT Dean of Students, who died in a plane crash in Egypt in 1949. The dormitory houses 318 undergraduates in single, double, triple, and quadruple rooms. A Baker House tradition involves dropping an old worn-out piano from the roof. Started by former Baker resident Charles Bruno in 1972, the piano is dropped on Drop Day—the last day MIT students can drop a class with no penalty. Notable Baker House alumni include
Kenneth Olsen (Electrical Engineering, 1950), co-founder of
Digital Equipment Corporation;
Amar Bose (Electrical Engineering, 1951), founder of the
Bose Corporation and inventor of numerous audio technologies;
Alan Guth (Physics, 1968), astrophysicist and professor of physics at MIT;
Timothy Carney (1966), former US Ambassador to Sudan and Haiti;
Gerald Sussman (Mathematics, 1968), professor of computer science at MIT;
Geoffrey A. Landis (Physics and Electrical Engineering, 1980), NASA scientist and science fiction writer;
Ronald T. Raines (Chemistry and Biology, 1980), professor of chemistry at MIT;
Cady Coleman (Chemistry, 1983),
NASA Astronaut;
Wes Bush (1983), former chairman and CEO,
Northrop Grumman; Warren Madden (1985),
Weather Channel meteorologist;
Jonathan Gruber (Economics, 1987), healthcare economist and political advisor;
Charles Korsmo (Physics, 2000), actor in movies such as
Hook and ''
Can't Hardly Wait'';
Ed Miller (Physics and Electrical Engineering, 2000), noted poker authority; and
Katy Croff Bell (Ocean Engineering, 2000),
National Geographic ocean explorer.
Burton-Conner House Burton-Conner House, (shortened to
Burton-Conner or
BC), is located at 410 Memorial Drive, on the north bank of the
Charles River. Burton-Conner houses 344 residents. The building is five stories high, plus a ground floor. Burton-Conner is a combination of two major sections of the former "Riverside" hotel and apartment building, which MIT acquired and reopened as a dormitory in 1950. "Burton House" consists of the 3 westernmost wings, while "Conner Hall" comprises the remaining 2 wings of the extended E-shaped structure. Burton is named after former dean
Alfred Edgar Burton. The two sections of the building are physically separated by a
firewall above the ground floor, with five residential floors on the Burton side and four on the Conner side. In the 1960s, a dining hall was added at the rear of Burton-Conner, on the side away from the river. Some years later, the dining hall was shut down and the space became the Porter Room, a shared meeting and student event space. The entire building underwent a complete restructuring during 1970–1971, when the internal layout was changed from a floor orientation (with floor-wide bathrooms and
communal showers) to a suite orientation (introducing kitchens, suite lounges, and semi-private bathrooms). Today, Burton-Conner amenities include a library with
Athena-network computers, a study area, an electronics lab and
darkroom (unused for over 10 years), music rooms, a game room, weight and exercise rooms, and a lounge with a snack bar. In February 2019, the MIT administration announced that Burton-Conner would be closed from June 2020 to August 2022 for a complete renovation. Dormitory residents expressed concerns about interim housing and the effects this might have on dormitory culture. The dormitory was re-opened during the wind-down of the
COVID-19 pandemic in September 2022, amid criticism that the building was "without landmarks" due to restrictions on students painting traditional wall murals.
East Campus and celebrations Variously known as
East Campus,
East Campus Alumni Memorial Houses, and
Fred the Dorm, East Campus is MIT's second oldest dormitory after the now closed Senior House. Located at 3 Ames Street, it is an undergraduate dormitory formed from six "houses", each named after an alumnus of MIT: East parallel, north to south: East Campus is arranged in two long north–south buildings, the East Parallel (one house built in 1924, extended to full parallel in 1928) and the West Parallel (built in 1931). The buildings are numbered 64 and 62, respectively, in MIT's
building numbering system. There are 5 floors, plus a non-residential basement, in each building. The three "houses" that make up a building are connected on each floor, functioning as one contiguous building. Residents identify themselves according to the ten "halls": First East through Fifth East, and First West through Fifth West. The two building basements are connected via a tunnel. The dormitory celebrated its 90th anniversary in 2014. Due to the dormitory's age, sturdiness, and tradition, the 350-400 undergrads living there are allowed to paint and alter rooms and floor common spaces, up to the limits of what the Cambridge
fire code will allow. Students frequently use technology to customize their rooms, building projects such as an Emergency Pizza Button to have a local pizza shop deliver a cheese pizza, a
disco dance floor, and an automatic door-unlocking system. The social life of East Campus residents includes ambitious build projects (such as a
roller coaster) during REX Rush Week, Bad Ideas Weekend during January, and various feasts and celebrations, generally located in the courtyard between the two parallels. Participants in such events have traditionally included some residents of nearby Senior House (before the undergraduate residents living there were disbanded), and continue to invite alumni of both residences to join in planning and attendance. Notable alumni of East Campus include
Rainer Weiss (Physics, 1955) MIT professor, inventor of the gravitational wave detector, and co-recipient of the 2017
Nobel Prize in Physics;
Ahmed Chalabi (Mathematics, 1965)
37th Prime Minister of Iraq;
George Smoot (Mathematics and Physics, 1966), second contestant to win the $1 million prize on
Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?, and co-recipient of the 2006
Nobel Prize in Physics;
Jacob K. White (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1980), MIT professor and
IEEE Fellow;
Michael Fincke (Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1989, and Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, 1989),
NASA astronaut;
Thomas Massie (Electrical Engineering, 1993),
US Representative for
Kentucky;
Arash Ferdowsi (no degree, 2008) co-founder of
Dropbox; and
Sam Bankman-Fried (Physics, 2014), founder of the
cryptocurrency trading firm Alameda Research and the
FTX cryptocurrency exchange. The dormitory was closed for two years beginning in June 2023 for a complete gut renovation. The renewed buildings are now completely air-conditioned, fully ADA-accessible, and include new amenities in common areas. During the closure, East Campus residents were housed in other dormitories, hotel rooms, and the building formerly occupied by an on-campus fraternity which had been disbanded. located at 450 Memorial Drive, was designed by
Pietro Belluschi, built in 1970, and named for Frank S. MacGregor (SB 1907, Physics). It consists of a 16-story high-rise tower, connected to a four-story low-rise surrounding a paved courtyard. Both parts consist of suites grouped into "entries" of three to four floors each. The entries are named by letter: A, B, C, D, and E entries are located in the tower and F, G, H, and J entries are located in the low-rise. There is no I-entry, because
i is
imaginary. The ground floor consists mostly of dormitory-wide common areas. Each suite in MacGregor houses six to eight people, usually coed; the entire dormitory houses 326 undergrads. Almost all rooms in MacGregor are singles; the three doubles in F entry are an architectural anomaly. Each suite comes equipped with a bathroom and a kitchen area with a 4-burner electric range-top; in addition, one suite in an entry also has an oven.
Maseeh Hall Maseeh Hall is located at 305 Memorial Drive, at the intersection of Memorial Drive and Massachusetts Avenue, across the Avenue from MIT's Building 1. The building itself predates MIT's move to Cambridge in 1916. It was originally operated as the "Riverbank Court Hotel" from 1901 to 1937. In 1938, MIT reopened it as "Graduate House", later renaming it "Ashdown House" after its first faculty housemaster, Avery Allen Ashdown. By the beginning of the 21st century, the building had become run-down and in need of renovation. Graduate students were moved out, to a new Ashdown House (NW35) located much further away, a controversial decision justified by a desire to house all undergrads as close as possible to MIT's central campus. The exterior of the emptied building was immediately repaired to stop water leaks and further deterioration, but there was no funding to renovate the interior of the structure. In 2010,
Fariborz Maseeh (ScD 1990, Civil Engineering) donated $24 million for the purpose of increasing MIT's undergraduate enrollment by 270 students (an increase of 6%). To enable this, the number of undergraduate dormitory beds needed to be increased, since MIT now requires all undergraduate students to live in dormitories on campus for at least their first year. Fariborz Maseeh's donation was used to renovate the building, and the building now bears his name. Maseeh Hall was first opened to undergrad residents in August 2011. Upon its re-opening, Maseeh Hall was MIT's largest undergrad dormitory with 462 beds; in 2013, the building's occupancy was further increased to 490. The lobby of Maseeh Hall is architecturally notable for its spacious vaulting and mosaic decorations made of
Guastavino tile.
McCormick Hall McCormick Hall, located at 320 Memorial Drive, is a women-only dormitory housing 237 undergrads. It consists of two 8-floor towers (the east tower and the west tower) and an annex converted from two adjacent
brownstone buildings. The three sections are connected on the ground floor. Each tower has a penthouse on the top floor that looks out on the Boston skyline. The east tower has only singles while the west tower has singles, doubles, and triples. The funds for building McCormick Hall came from
Katharine Dexter McCormick (SB 1904, Biology), a leading
biologist,
suffragist, and
philanthropist in the early twentieth century. McCormick Hall was designed to advocate and encourage female participation in the field of STEM, supporting gender equality in the former US educational system.
Herbert Beckwith, a faculty member in the MIT architecture department, was the designer of McCormick Hall. The west tower was first built in 1963 and the east tower was built later in 1967. sometimes referred to as
New West Campus Houses, houses 291 undergraduates at 471–476 Memorial Drive. The dormitory is a series of six joined five-story buildings arranged in a zig-zag fashion, each named after alumni. There are kitchens and common areas scattered throughout the dormitory. There is a tunnel connecting New House and neighboring MacGregor House. New House was constructed in 1975 and holds nine separate living groups. From 2017 to 2018, New House underwent an extensive renovation to upgrade infrastructure and improve quality of life. The renovation improved
accessibility, enhanced environmental
sustainability, and brought in new amenities. New features of the renovated dormitory included an arcade, an improved first-floor lounge, and interconnected corridors on upper floors. However, residents lamented the significant impact on student communities that resulted from the renovation project. Students noted that the "pre-existing culture of New House...has largely been lost", pointing to the stress of having to frequently move between temporary housing buildings and the difficulty of rebuilding communities in such circumstances. (W46) is the newest completed dormitory, opened for the first time in spring semester 2021, accommodating 450 students. The building is located at 189 Vassar Street, the site of a former
parking facility named West Garage. On February 28, 2019, an accident at the construction site killed one worker and injured two others. Evidence suggests that a material collapse from an upper floor fell down on top of the three workers. MIT portrays New Vassar as a "living-learning community" that helps students grow both academically and personally. Dormitory amenities, including a dining hall, a communal kitchen, a courtyard, a
makerspace, and group study lounges, were chosen to promote social engagement. However, MIT students have criticized the design process for New Vassar as "a history of broken promises", with valuable student feedback "destroyed by top-down administrative backtracking". Early in the design stage for New Vassar, MIT administrators sought student input to articulate a set of guiding principles for future dormitories, making mutually acceptable compromise between student well-being and administrative needs. Later, administrators unilaterally reversed several decisions without student approval. The incident drew heavy criticism of MIT's leadership and decision-making process, with extensive student feedback and cooperation regularly being overturned with "vague appeals" to statistical data.
Next House Next House, located at 500 Memorial Drive, is five stories tall and houses about 350 people. Patterned after the success of Baker House, it opened in September 1981. The "Next House" designation was unofficial and thought to be temporary until a sufficient donation had been received to name the dormitory. As a result, the institute has nearly always referred to the building as
500 Memorial Drive, while students have always called the dormitory "Next House". The first level is home to the Tastefully Furnished Lounge (TFL), along with music practice rooms, Next Dining (open daily to all MIT students for breakfast and dinner),
Athena computing cluster, and workout rooms. The TFL was so named at the first Next House governance meeting: the words "Tastefully Furnished Lounge" had originally appeared in an official brochure distributed at the dedication ceremonies for MacGregor House, and were ironically adopted because the space was initially barely furnished at all. The Next House basement level offers a laundry room, game area, and the Country Kitchen.
Random Hall Random Hall located at 290
Massachusetts Avenue, was created by the joining of two old, identical buildings, a process known to some residents as "
siamization". It is the oldest building owned by MIT, and lacks elevators. Originally built in 1894, the building was converted to a visiting students and overflow dormitory in 1968. In the spring and summer of 1977, it was quickly remodeled for undergraduate use to accommodate the unexpectedly large matriculation of the Class of 1981. Random Hall is the smallest of the MIT dormitories, housing only about 93 undergraduates. Its location is also unique among undergraduate dormitories, being about a block past the northern border of the main campus. Random Hall was known for its early implementation of bathroom and laundry machine
online servers, which allowed people to determine remotely whether bathrooms and washers or dryers are in use. Random Hall was the home of
The Milk, a -year-old carton of rancid
milk. The carton was originally purchased by Justin O. Cave '98 in 1994 for the purpose of making
macaroni and cheese. After forgetting to consume it, residents of Random Hall rediscovered it ten months after its expiration date. The incident gave rise to several activities and celebrations regarding The Milk, including
birthday parties, awards for the "Ugliest Manifestation on Campus", and a joke application for admission to MIT. The Milk was declared missing on August 20, 2022, and has yet to be found.
Simmons Hall Simmons Hall located at 229 Vassar Street, was designed by architect
Steven Holl and dedicated in 2002. At the cost of $78.5 million, it is MIT's most expensive dormitory built on campus since Baker House. The building is long and 10 stories tall, housing 344 undergraduate students. The structure is a large
reinforced concrete block, perforated with approximately 5,500 square windows each measuring on a side, plus additional larger and irregularly shaped windows. An average single room has nine windows, each with its own small curtain. Internal design consists of one- and two-person rooms, plus lounges with and without kitchens. Rooms are roughly arranged into three towers (the "A", "B", and "C" towers). Simmons Hall has a dining hall and a late-night cafe. The building also has some more esoteric facilities, such as a large
ball pit, an electronics
makerspace, and a
woodworking shop. Many of the residents of Simmons complain that aesthetics came as a higher priority than functionality. Opinions on the aesthetics of the building remain strongly divided. Simmons Hall won the 2003
American Institute of Architects Honor Award for Architecture, and the 2004
Harleston Parker Medal, administered by the
Boston Society of Architects and awarded to the "most beautiful piece of architecture building, monument or structure" in the
Boston area. Simmons Hall was featured in the exhibit
Inside the Sponge—Students Take on MIT Simmons Hall at the
Canadian Centre for Architecture in
Montreal in the fall of 2006. On the other hand, the building has been criticized as being ugly, a sentiment echoed in
James Kunstler's
Eyesore of the Month catalog. Within the building is a sculpture commissioned by American artist
Dan Graham. Titled the
Yin Yang Pavilion, it consists of a partially reflective, glass-walled, gravel-paved area in the shape of half of the
yin-yang symbol in plan, while the other half contains a shallow pool of water. ==Former undergraduate dormitories==