The Simmons Hall on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is part of M.I.T.’s ambition to impart unique contemporary architecture on their expanding campus. There are already buildings by Frank Gehry, Kevin Roche and Fumihiko Maki. The 350 bed residence is envisioned to Steven Holl as a part of the city form and campus form with a concept of ‘porosity’ along Vassar Street. It is a vertical slice of a city ten stories tall and 350 feet long.

The urban concept provides amenities to students within the dormitory such as a 125 seat theater, as well as a night cafe. House dining is on street level, like a street front restaurant with a special awning and outdoor tables. Eight atria connect the floors vertically in a manner more flowing than rigid, contrasting the regimented exterior. The combination of circulation with dorm rooms and ancillary functions is the primary programmatic solution that reinforces the notion of the building as a slice of the city. Parts of the city are lifted into the building and inserted next to internal streets, for use by students and their guests, in effect making the building a contemporary re-interpretation of Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation in Marseilles, France.

The Simmons Hall is envisioned with the concept of porosity. With sponge concept, Steven Holl transforms the building via a series of programmatic and bio-technical functions. The building has five large openings corresponding to main entrances, view corridors, and outdoor activity terraces of the dormitory connected to programs such as the fitness center. The next scale of opening creates vertical porosity in the block with a ruled surface system freely connected to sponge prints, plan to section. These large, dynamic openings (roughly corresponding to the ‘houses’ in the dorm) are the lungs, bringing natural light down and moving air up.

The ‘PerfCon’ structure is a unique design, allowing Simmons Hall for maximum flexibility and interaction. Each of the 350 dorm rooms looks out from an amazing nine windows. The 18 feet depth of the wall naturally allowing for winter light to enter while shading the rooms from the summer sun. In the deep setting of the numerous windows color is applied to the head and jamb creating identity for each of the ten ‘houses’ within the overall building. At night, light from these windows is rhythmic and magical.

With bedrock too deep to reach and soil too unstable to support friction piles, the building was designed to ‘float’ like a boat in water. A volume of soil, equal to the weight of the building above, was excavated. Once complete, the pressure exerted by the building equals the pressure from the soil that had been removed. A 4 feet thick solid concrete matt foundation evenly distributes the building load to the soil below. Computer generated structural models of the ‘PerfCon’ structure showed areas in Simmons Hall that were critically overstressed due to long spans and bent spans over open corners. Select windows in these areas were filled in to resolve the overstressed conditions.

Based upon a structural diagram used to coordinate the size of reinforcing steel in the ‘PerfCon’ panels, the colored jambs express the anticipated maximum stresses in the structure. Steven Holl uses the colors to reveal the size of the reinforcing steel cast within the PerfCon Panels. Blue=#5, Green=#6, Yellow=#7, Orange=#8, Red=#9 and #10. Uncolored areas are #5 or smaller. 9 operable windows per single room allow students options for ventilation, views and privacy. Opening high and low windows takes advantage of the natural rise of warm air within the high-ceiling rooms.

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