I~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ . !'~~~~~~~~~~~- I:. ' a x - ~~u-4gAIII~ Building 20 The Procreative Eyesore By Simson Garfinkel, '87 It's an eyesore with a distinguished tect enemy planes. Four months later, past and an uncertain future. It's a shrouded in secrecy, the MIT Radiation 48-year-old monstrosity built of ply- Laboratory set up shop in Building 4. Mili- wood, cinder block, and engineers' tary RADAR was about to be invented. dreams. It's been the focal point for tales The first thing the new laboratory need- of zaniness and creativity going back more ed was staff. An MIT-hosted physics con- than a generation. ference in the fall provided fertile ground. "It's the best building in the place;' says Documents at the MIT Museum tell how President Emeritus Jerome Wiesner, who the attendees at that 1940 conference were worked there for more than a decade. surprised to find that the majority of the It's Building 20, a three-story, papers offered were on the subject of 200,000-square-foot shack built soon after microwave radiation. During the confer- the United States entered World War II. Al- ence, a series of interviews were conduct- ways intended as a temporary structure, ed behind closed doors, and by the end of the building evolved through a combina- the week, a cadre of scientists was in place. tion of accident, fate, and providence into The lab quickly outgrew its space in a nest of creativity that has few equals in Building 4 and expanded into a three-story the annals of the In- tar-paper shack hastily built atop Building 6. Soon other temporary structures start- Building 20 stitute. ed popping up like mushrooms: wooden began life as the In the spring of home of the Radi- 1940, Europe was at huts at the west end of campus housed ation Laboratory, war. The United scientists and graduate students; new labs where ultimately States was officially in Buildings 22 and 24 sprung up along- 4,000 staff mem- neutral, but its sym- side Vassar Street. bers designed, pathies clearly lay But the ad hoc bits and pieces were not built, and tested with the Allies. On adequate for the more than 1,500 people radarsystems a secret mission that working for the Radiation Lab by 1942. that turned the spring, Sir Henry That spring, physicist A.J. Allen, the first tide for the Allies Tizard brought the head of Building and Grounds for the in the late years project, called Don Whiston, '32, an ar- of World WarWorld II. nofewly perfected This Model Shop, magnetron tube to chitect at McCreery and Theriault Ar- for instance, the United States. chitects. Before the end of the day, Allen was a miniature He hoped to enlist said, he needed a list of building specifi- factory where this country's help cations and preliminary plans for a each worker built in developing a sys- 200,000-square-foot building. Whiston a complete unit. tern that could use came through, and Building 20, at 18 Vas- microwaves to de- sar Street, was underway. TECHNOLOGY REVIEW MIT 9 ing anti-aircraft guns, and locating enemy U-boats. The Radiation Laboratory's charter last- ed only until the end of the war. "Just like with the senior class, it was announct I that people would be available. Compa- nies came around here to hire;' remem- bers Professor Louis D. Smullin, '39. But to many, breaking up the lab seemed like a waste. "There was an enormous pent-up set of ideas" remembers Wiesner. Physicists wanted to build a new genera- tion of particle accelerators. Electrical en- gineers wanted to apply radar to communications. Everybody wanted to explore the promise of computers. The military also wanted to see electronics research at MIT continue. Mostly, says Wiesner, they didn't want to shut down a laboratory with a proven track record that might be needed in some future war effort. nd so the Research Laboratory Electronics (RLE) was born. Where to put it? "People were hired right after the war-people like me. We had to have a place to work. We had to have a place to put the students;' says Wiesner, who later served as RLE's direc- Building 20 is really six buildings, each tor. "It would have taken two to three years three stories high with no basement. Each to build new buildings, and we would section rests on huge wooden beams bolt- have had to raise the money." ed in place. The rooms were large by MIT With space at the Institute always at standards, but otherwise working in the premium, there was only one possibility: building was no picnic. It was cold in the the "temporary" Building 20. James R. Kil- winter, oppressive in the summer. The lian, Jr., '26, assistant to President Karl Tay- roof leaked. The windows never fit lor Compton, negotiated with both the properly. Dust from the construction, then U.S. government and the City of Cam- dirt from the wood of the building itself, bridge to transfer ownership of Building was everywhere. 20 to the Institute. The building's roof was covered with Saddled with the dusty, dingy, poorly Much of the information gypsum planks, but even so, it was in clear ventilated wooden structure, the Research coming into the communica- violation of Cambridge building codes, Laboratory for Electronics thrived. It was tion hut in the Pacific theater which prohibited wooden buildings in the Institute's first interdepartmental lab, (top) was radioed in by the that industrial East Cambridge neighbor- combining electronics, physics, nuclear operators of ground-based and hood. The only way that MIT could get a science, and acoustics. And while RLE's airborne radardesigned at Rad building permit at all was by promising mix of the best and brightest electronics ex- Lab. The trucks backed up to that the building would be a temporary perts in the world was surely responsible Building 20 in August 1944 structure, to be torn down when it was no for the lab's success, the building itself was were loading on the first opera- tional microwave early warn- longer needed. a player as well. ing (MEW) radarsystem-all By the war's end, more than 4,000 peo- "I think that a lot of things were better be- 66-1/2 tons of it-for shipment ple were working for the Rad Lab, and the cause of Building 20" says Wiesner. "You to England. According to one U.S. military had pumped in more than $2 had ample space: a little more than you contemporary report, "One of billion. Historians looking back described needed, rather than a little less, which is these sets proved so effective in it as "a university in a pressure cooker"; the normal situation!" Best of all, Building directing the planes fighting during the Lab's five-year tenure, micro- 20 was made out of wood. It's a feature that buzz bombs that only Prime wave electronics advanced 25 years. many of the building's occupants have Minister Churchill was able to Engineers perfected the magnetron as commented on. "You could do anything pry it loose from the RAF on well as the associated circuits needed to you wanted within your own confines," the eve of D-Day to send it to Normandy to control General turn radar from a laboratory curiosity into says Professor Emeritus Jerome Lettvin Patton's tactical air support." a war-fighting tool. The Lab developed ra- who worked in electronics and physiolo- dars for navigation, weather monitoring, gy. "You could put up partitions, take them detecting incoming enemy aircraft, direct- down, rewire anything you wanted to"' MI1`10 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER1991 PHOTOS: MIT MUSEUM,CALVIN CAMPBELL/MIT NEWSOFFICE In 1952 Professor Jerrold Zacharias knocked out two floors of the building to make room for a three-story metal column that became the world's first atomic clock. 'rofessor Walter Rosenblith took out the rloors and walls in one lab and made a floating room: Rosenblith was working with hearing and vision and had to meas- ure very small signals without any chance of vibration. In another part of the building, RLE con- structed an entire room out of mu-metal, a substance impervious to electronic noise and magnetic fields. "To get that damn thing in, they had to practically disman- tle the corridor," remembers Lettvin. The room was rebuilt around the mu-metal cage, which is still there today. In one of Building 20's two garages, a group of physicists built a linear accelera- tor driven by a Van de Graaff generator and microwave electronics. At the time the 17-million-volt accelerator was the most powerful in the world. Once again, Build- ing 20's flexibility came in handy-this time making it easy to construct a concrete- and-lead vault for radiation shielding. "It was just the norm;' explains Wiesner. "The whole thing was made of plywood. If you didn't like what you had, you just more than 30 years before "retiring" to Rut- changed it." gers. "You might regard it as the womb of the Institute," Lettvin says. "It is kind of Tlaboratorye was extremely well messy, but by God it is procreative!" funded, thanks to a $600,000 Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the highly annual grant from the Army, Air successful acoustic and computer consult- Force, and Office of Naval Research ing firm, got its start in Building 20's Wing (ONR). The grant was incredibly open- F, the home of the MIT Acoustics ended, chartering RLE to "do research in Laboratory.