"I Live in an Alvar Aalto"

What is your favorite Aalto fact that you tell visiting architects when giving tours?

I like telling them about how the character of each section of the floor changes due to the building's wave shape in plan. It divides the hall up into sections -- west, central, and east. West is more social because rooms are doubles, quads, or triples; east is a row of quieter small singles; central is somewhere in between, with social people who live in singles next to the lounge. Aalto designed it in a really clever way -- he definitely had the social aspect in mind, and wanted to cater to the different range of people who came to MIT so they could have their own spaces.

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Was the building's curvy shape really conceived as a sine curve, or did math-y people label that afterwards?

[Smiles.] It must have been MIT students over the ages. The real reason for the curve is to maximize the number of sunny, south-facing river views up and down the Charles, not just across -- because that's what you would naturally see when you're on the river.

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I notice that more people take staircases here than any other dorm.

Yes - even with six floors, you will get frowned at if you take elevator even up to the 4th floor. The staircases are really well-lit, and are actually very nice places to walk. They feel natural, not like a fire escape.

Aalto's minute, tactile details such as leather-wrapped door handles, tile-covered columns, and brick-to-wood connections (at Finland's Jyväskylä University, Paimio Sanatorium, among others) are what make him famous. What details are evident in Baker?

He definitely thought about how people would live, down to the smallest spaces they would need. All closets have built-in shelves, and there are even smaller built-in compartments for things like socks. The cuvature of the bent-plywood chairs are carefully calibrated. Also, it's pretty unique to live in a dorm whose wood furniture connect so well to the brick interior walls -- some aren't partial to the brick, but I really like that my walls never seem blank, even when undecorated.

Many of the students who live here are engineers and not aspiring architects. Do you think they appreciate Aalto?

Most are pretty unaware, but I would say that people enjoy the many riverviews and the lounges. The lounge spaces are very communal, as opposed to 'belonging to certain rooms' like Simmons Hall, so everyone feels welcome to gather without worrying whether or not it is 'their lounge.' I would say that the architecture does filter into everyone's lives, whether or not they realize it. A unique vocabulary sort of emerges -- the students call different rooms by their shape, such as the Pies (wedge-shaped), Couches (bigger ones with said furniture), and Coffins (rectangular).

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Also in contrast to Steven Holl's Simmons, Aalto designed the furniture to be custom-fit to each specific room, instead of the expected modularity of a college dorm. How has this impacted your living style?

Sometimes it's not convenient if you want to completely rearrange your room. But it shows how deliberate and detail-oriented he was -- he even gave each piece of his furniture a nickname. The closet is 'elephant,' the shelves above desks are 'giraffes,' storages under desk are 'alligators,' and the rolley drawers under the desk are 'armadillos.'

What's another one of your favorite spaces in the dorm that people may not notice?

One of Aalto's obsessions was moonlight, so he constructed a 'moon garden' above the Baker Dining Hall, which has a maple-slatted ceiling punctuated by circular skylights and is illuminated by lamps hanging over from outside. Quite romantic at night, really.