Green Building
- Architect
- I. M. Pei
- Year
- 1964
- Style
- Brutalism
- City
- Boston, MA
- Collections
- concrete bostoncambridge campus moderns
The Cecil and Ida Green Building — Building 54 — is an 18-story academic tower at MIT in Cambridge, completed in 1964 and designed by I. M. Pei with Araldo Cossutta. Principal donor Cecil Howard Green, an MIT graduate and co-founder of Texas Instruments, funded the building, which now houses the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences and stands among Cambridge's tallest structures.
the building
Concrete facade. Built 1962–1964 in reinforced concrete, the tower rises 277 feet over 21 stories. Its concrete facade was shaped to echo the limestone and concrete of MIT's older buildings nearby, and the basement — which sits below sea level — connects into MIT's tunnel system.
Blank end walls. The building's east and west staircase facades present vast windowless expanses of concrete, broken only by one-story-tall recessed panels — a stark, sculptural gesture typical of the brutalist idiom.
the style
Brutalist in its raw, load-bearing use of poured concrete, the Green Building nonetheless ties itself to MIT's older campus fabric: Pei shaped the concrete facade to recall the limestone-and-concrete look of the buildings around it rather than breaking with them outright.
More on Brutalismthe architect
I. M. Pei earned his bachelor's degree in architecture at MIT in 1940, a personal tie to this campus commission. He designed the Green Building together with Araldo Cossutta.
significance
The Green Building is one of the tallest buildings in Cambridge, a distinction it has held since its 1964 completion.
nearby
- Wiesner building
- Stata Center
- MIT Chapel
- Kresge Auditorium
- Arthur D. Little Inc., Building
- Baker House