MIT Campus

MIT's campus is a walk through 20th and 21st-century architecture that happens to also be one of the world's great engineering universities. The main entrance at 77 Massachusetts Avenue leads through the Maclaurin Building — a neoclassical limestone structure with the Great Dome, modelled on the Pantheon in Rome — and then the campus explodes in every architectural direction imaginable.

Frank Gehry's Stata Center is the building that everyone comes to photograph — a collision of tilting, colourful forms that look like a cartoon city after an earthquake. Housing the computer science and artificial intelligence labs, it's a building that practices what it preaches: unconventional thinking expressed in physical form. Gehry's design was controversial (MIT sued the firm over construction defects), but it's become one of Cambridge's most recognisable landmarks. Eero Saarinen's MIT Chapel — a windowless brick cylinder lit by a skylight that sends light cascading down a metal screen — is the quieter masterpiece, a space of genuine contemplation hidden behind the bustle of the campus.

The MIT Museum, relocated to a prominent space on Massachusetts Avenue, showcases the university's contributions to technology, robotics, and science through interactive exhibits that are genuinely fun rather than earnestly educational. The Infinite Corridor — a 825-foot-long hallway that runs the length of the main campus and twice a year aligns with the setting sun in a phenomenon called 'MIThenge' — is the kind of detail that makes MIT's campus feel like a place where even the infrastructure is doing science.