MIT's Sloan building appealing, not audacious

Now compare those with the latest at MIT. It’s the new building for the Sloan School of Management, MIT’s business school. The new Sloan is a place for MIT workaholics who don’t much care what architecture looks like.

The attitude is summed up in the words of Paul Asquith, a Sloan professor who helped lead the building committee. He says: “We told the architects that we care a lot more what people will think of the building when they leave at the end of the day than when they arrive in the morning.’’

I don’t want to exaggerate. The Sloan is a very good building. It’s just good in a different way.

Instead of standing out as a monument in the city, like Stata and Simmons, Sloan seeks to fit politely in. It carefully imitates the colors and materials of the buildings around it, from the greenish glass of a nearby office tower to the warm toned limestone of the original MIT. The designers were California architects Moore Ruble Yudell. In 2006, MRY won the prestigious national Firm Award from the American Institute of Architects.

The strength of the new Sloan is the way it mixes so many different activities in the interior. The hope is that the inhabitants — students, professors, visitors — will bump into one another a lot as they move around. Even the fire stairs are spacious and light-filled, so they too can become casual meeting space.

There are faculty offices, classrooms, seminar rooms, student study rooms, a faculty lounge, underground parking, much else. The heart of the building is a big double-height space on the ground floor called the Gallery. The Gallery includes a big restaurant, open all day to anyone from MIT, and it also includes study and social space. It’s intended as the new democratic heart of the school. Flooded with sunlight (a little too much, maybe, on a recent winter’s day), it enjoys a panoramic view of the Charles River and the city of Boston beyond.