Stewart Brand's book How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built has a great chapter on MIT's Building 20.
> Building 20 was a temporary wooden structure hastily erected during World War II on the central campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Radiation Laboratory member said, "At one time, more than 20 percent of the physicists in the United States (including nine Nobel Prize winners) had worked in that building".
> Due to Building 20's origins as a temporary structure, researchers and other occupants felt free to modify their environment at will. As described by MIT professor Paul Penfield, "Its 'temporary nature' permitted its occupants to abuse it in ways that would not be tolerated in a permanent building. If you wanted to run a wire from one lab to another, you didn't ask anybody's permission — you just got out a screwdriver and poked a hole through the wall".
this building gets mentioned in a lot of management books and "where good ideas come from" to illustrate a good collaborative environment. it has been replicated by quite a few places with various degrees of success. its main function is that there are no permanent work places so that people are forced to collaborate. This has not always worked out well.
could it be that MIT happened to have a lot of smart people and they created good things while working in building 2.0, and they would have created just as many great things if they worked in another building?
maybe im just extra skeptical because im currently reading "Fooled by Randomness" :)
It's quite possible that the building was special and did have an effect that was lost when people tried to replicate it. Trying to replicate things is usually a losing game.
For example, I bet they didn't replicate its temporariness or the fact that you could make holes in it.
Good point. It can be easy to conflate cause, effect, and coincidence.
The lesson I take from the story is that the smart people had extreme freedom to pursue their research. I don't think a university can just create a dumpy building and hope to produce some Nobel prizes. <:)
> Building 20 was a temporary wooden structure hastily erected during World War II on the central campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Radiation Laboratory member said, "At one time, more than 20 percent of the physicists in the United States (including nine Nobel Prize winners) had worked in that building".
> Due to Building 20's origins as a temporary structure, researchers and other occupants felt free to modify their environment at will. As described by MIT professor Paul Penfield, "Its 'temporary nature' permitted its occupants to abuse it in ways that would not be tolerated in a permanent building. If you wanted to run a wire from one lab to another, you didn't ask anybody's permission — you just got out a screwdriver and poked a hole through the wall".
http://www.usablebuildings.co.uk/Pages/Unprotected/MITBldg20...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_20