The Innovator's Cookbook

But the most loved and legendary building of all at MIT is a surprise: a temporary building left over from World War II without even a name, only a number: Building 20. It is a sprawling 250,000 square-foot ^a three-story wood structure—“The only building on campus you can cut with a saw,” says an admirer— constructed hastily in 1943 for the urgent development of radar and almost immediately slated for demolition. When I last saw it in 1993, it was still in use and still slated for demolition. In 1978 the MIT Museum assembled an exhibit to honor the perpetual fruitfulness of Building 20. The press release read:

Unusual flexibility made the building ideal for laboratory and experimental space. Made to support heavy loads and of wood construction, it allowed a use of space which accommodated the enlargement of the working environment either horizontally or vertically. Even the roof was used for short-term structures to house equipment and test instruments.

Although Building 20 was built with the intention to tear it down after the end of World War II, it has remained these thirty-five years providing a special function and acquiring its own history and anecdotes. Not assigned to any one school, department, or center, it seems to always have had space for the beginning project, the graduate student’s experiment, the interdisciplinary research center.

Indeed, MIT’s first interdisciplinary laboratory, the renowned Research Laboratory of Electronics, founded much of modern communications science there right after the war. The science of linguistics was largely started there, and forty years later in 1993 one of its pioneers, Noam Chomsky, was still rooted there. Innovative labs for the study of nuclear science, cosmic rays, dynamic analysis and control, acoustics, and food technology were born there. Harold Edgerton developed stroboscopic photography there. New-technology companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Bolt, Baranek, and Newman incubated in Building 20 and later took its informal ways with them into their corporate cultures and headquarters. The Tech Model Railroad Club on the third floor, E Wing, was the source in the early 1960s of most of the first generation of computer “hackers,” who set in motion a series of computer technology revolutions (still in progress).

1945: Here photographed from a Navy blimp at the end of World War II, the so-called Radiation Laboratory at Building 20 was one of its unsung heroes. In an undertaking similar in scope to the Manhattan project that created the atomic bomb, the emergency development of radar employed the nation’s best physicists in an intense collaboration that changed the nature of science. Unlike Los Alamos, the MIT radar project was not run by the military, and unlike Los Alamos, no secrets got out. The verdict of scientists afterward was, “The atom bomb only ended the war. Radar won it.” THE MIT MUSEUM. NEG. NO. CC-20-417.

Like most Low Road buildings, Building 20 was too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, Spartan in its amenities, often dirty, and implacably ugly. Whatever was the attraction? The organizers of the 1978 exhibit queried alumni of the building and got illuminating answers. “Windows that open and shut at will of the owner!” (Martha Ditmeyer) “The ability to personalize your space and shape it to various purposes. If you don’t like a wall, just stick your elbow through it.” (Jonathan Allan) “If you want to bore a hole in the floor to get a little extra vertical space, you do it. You don’t ask. It’s the best experimental building ever built.” (Albert Hill) “One never needs to worry about injuring the architectural or artistic value of the environment.” (Morris Halle) “We feel our space is really ours. We designed it, we run it. The building is full of small microenvironments, each of which is different and each a creative space. Thus the building has a lot of personality. Also it’s nice to be in a building that has such prestige.” (Heather Lechtman)

In 1991 I asked Jerome Wiesner, retired president of MIT, why he thought that “temporary” Building 20 was still around after half a century. His first answer was practical: “At three hundred dollars a square foot, it would take seventy-five million dollars to replace.” His next answer was aesthetic: “It’s a very matter-of-fact building. It puts on the personality of the people in it.” His final answer was personal. When he was appointed president of the university, he quietly kept a hideaway office in Building 20 because that was where “nobody complained when you nailed something to a door.”

Every university has similar stories. Temporary is permanent, and permanent is temporary. Grand, final-solution buildings obsolesce and have to be torn down because they were too overspecified to their original purpose to adapt easily to anything else. Temporary buildings are thrown up quickly and roughly to house temporary projects. Those projects move on soon enough but they are immediately supplanted by other temporary projects—of which, it turns out, there is an endless supply. The projects flourish in the low-supervision environment, free of turf battles because the turf isn’t worth fighting over. “We did some of our best work in the trailers, didn’t we?” I once heard a Nobel-winning physicist remark. Low Road buildings keep being valuable precisely because they are disposable.

Building 20 raises a question about what are the real amenities. Smart people gave up good heating and cooling, carpeted hallways, big windows, nice views, state-of-the-art construction, and pleasant interior design for what? For sash windows, interesting neighbors, strong floors, and freedom.

Many have noticed that young artists flock to rundown industrial neighborhoods, and then a predictable sequence occurs. The artists go there for the low rents and plenty of room to mess around. They make the area exciting, and some begin to spruce it up. Eventually it becomes fashionable, with trendy restaurants, nightclubs, and galleries. Real estate values rise to the point where young artists can’t afford the higher rents, and the sequence begins again somewhere else. Economic activity follows Low Road activity.

Jane Jacobs explains why:

Only operations that are well-established, high-turnover, standardized or highly subsidized can afford, commonly, to carry the costs of new construction. Chain stores, chain restaurants, and banks go into new construction. But neighborhood bars, foreign restaurants and pawn shops go into older buildings. Supermarkets and shoe stores often go into new buildings; good bookstores and antique dealers seldom do. Well-subsidized opera and art museums often go into new buildings. But the unformalized feeders of the arts—studios, galleries, stores for musical instruments and art supplies, backrooms where the low earning power of a seat and table can absorb uneconomic discussions—these go into old buildings . . .

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must come from old buildings.^b

A related economic sequence happened around houses. People used to store stuff in basements and attics (big tools and toys in the cellar, clothes and memories in the attic). These were the raw, undifferentiated, Low Roadish parts of the house. But after the 1920s, basements and attics were eschewed by new bungalows, Modernist homes, and ranch houses. Basement storage moved into the garage, but then it got displaced again when the garage was converted to a studio, home office, spare bedroom, or rental unit. Where did the storage go next? Economic activity followed Low Road activity. The “self-storage” business took off in the 1970s and 1980s. Windowless clusters of garagelike spaces at the edge of town or edge of industrial districts were thrown together and rented out cheap.^c In these spaces you find the damnedest things—a boxer working out, quiet adultery, an old gent in a huge chair enjoying a cigar away from his wife, an entire British barn in pieces, a hydroponic garden, stolen goods, a motorcycle repair shop, an artist’s studio, someone shaping surfboards, lots of very ordinary storage, and, about once a month somewhere in America, a dead body.

When my wife, Patty Phelan, started an equestrian mail order catalogue business, she took over one bay of a huge old wood building left over from World War II—part of a shipyard that had built Liberty ships and tankers. Her bay had all the usual amenities—concrete floor, a too-narrow, too-deep space, ill-lit, with a sixty-foot ceiling. She and her staff froze in the winter and baked in the summer. But that space absorbed five years of drastic growth. The company went from one employee to twenty-four, from fifty thousand dollars a year to $3.2 million, while keeping all of its warehousing and shipping on the site. Piece by piece she grew the space, first constructing a second floor, then breaking through a wall into the adjoining bay when that tenant moved out and adding a second floor in there, then cutting through her back wall into some ceilingless interior rooms and roofing them in. Her rent stayed low while she added a skylight, ceiling fans, openable windows, a dutch door, lots more wiring, lots more lighting, and a kitchen.

That’s the patterns that developers thought they might be able to duplicate—long, low, cheap building, a series of bays, each with a garage door, low rent, nothing fancy. Called “incubators,” they were built by the hundreds, and they prospered. By 1990 there was a National Business Incubation Association boosting another Low Road–derivative industry.

The wonder is that Low Road building use has never been studied formally, either for academic or commercial interest or to tease out design principles that might be useful in other buildings. What do people do to buildings when they can do almost anything they want? I haven’t researched the question either, but I’ve lived some of it. [The book in which this essay appears] was assembled and written in two classic Low Road buildings. My writing office was a derelict landlocked fishing boat named the Mary Heartline. Decades ago, after its fishing career was over, a gay couple acquired it for dockside trysts, fixing it up like a Victorian cottage. Then two divorced gentlemen took it over, also for trysts, but it began sinking, so they moved it onto land, ostensibly for repair. It became a real-estate office, a subscriptions-handling office, and then I got it. It was on no property map of the town. If you leaned against the hull in the wrong place, your hand would go through. It’s probably gone by the time you’re reading this.

Thanks to the gay couple’s Victorian tastes, the place was a maze of little niches, drawers, and cupboards. It was like working inside an old-fashioned rolltop desk. One day I acquired a fax machine. There being no convenient place to park it, I used a saber saw to hack out a level place by the old steering wheel, along with a hole for the electrical and phone lines. It took maybe ten minutes and required no one else’s opinion. When you can make adjustments to your space by just picking up a saber saw, you know you’re in a Low Road building.

My research library was in a shipping container twenty yards away—one of thirty rented out for self-storage. I got the steel eight-by-eight-by-forty-foot space for $250 a month and spent all of one thousand dollars fixing it up with white paint, cheap carpet, lights, an old couch, and raw plywood work surfaces and shelves. It was heaven. To go in there was to enter the book-inprogress—all the notes, tapes, 5x8 cards, photos, negatives, magazines, articles, 450 books, and other research oddments laid out by chapters or filed carefully. When the summer sun made it too hot for work, I sawed a vent in the wood floor, put a black-painted length of stovepipe out of the ceiling, and slathered the whole top of the container with brightly reflective aluminum paint—end of heat problem. That’s how Low Road buildings are made livable: just do it.

In fact, weather becomes a perverse attraction. Whereas competent sealed buildings lull us with their “perfect climate,” and incompetent ones drive us crazy with their uncontrollable heats and colds, a drafty old building reminds us what the weather is up to outside and invites us to do something about it—put on a sweater; open a window. Rain is loud on the roof. You smell and feel the seasons. Weather comes in the building a bit. That sort of invasion we would condemn in a new building and blame the architect, but in a ratty old building—designed for some other use after all—there’s no one to blame.

Such buildings leave fond memories of improvisation and sensuous delight. When I lived with an artists’ commune in an old church in New York State, I slept in the steeple in front of the rose window overlooking the stream below. The major problem was being pooped on by pigeons, so I made a canopy from the canvas of a large bad painting (art side up) and thereafter slept in comfort, cooed to my rest by flights of angels.