7 - Rogers Building

Not part of the original building group, although designed by Welles Bosworth; built by Stone and Webster. Originally designed for school of architecture. "The portico will have sufficient depth to provide both effective shelter from the elements and the desirable richness of shadow in the facade. Three-story, ornamental grilles over the dorways will contribute to the dignity of the effect." Technology Review, 1937. Also planned for the building: heat and refrigeration labs for Mechanical Engineering, shop for the science museum, ,Lowell Institute offices, etc

Statistics about Building 7 from the Tech, Vol. LVII No. 57, January 14 1938, "Statistics Fiend goes on Rampage with Architecture Building Figures": "The new building on Massachusetts Avenue will have 8500 cubic yards of concrete in it when completed. Poured into 12 ounce beer cans, this would fill 18,250,000 of them.

Assuming a height of 5 inches per can, they would stretch some 1440 miles if laid end to end, which would reach well beyond Chicago if one end were held in Boston. Only it has been suggested that it might be better to keep all of the beer cans in Boston. Distributed at Technology, each student would have some 6,300 of these cans.

There is not as much brick in the building as concrete, the 670,000 bricks used reaching only three-fifths of the way to New York, making it necessary to use the post road for the rest of the way.

But in volume the building is immense, having 2,161,000 cubic feet of space. Assuming each student architect to occupy a space of twelve cubic feet, it would take over 180,000 of them to fill the building. But large as this space is it is only ten times as large as the volume of concrete in the building.

...

The 430 tons of structural steel and 615 tons of steel reinforcing bars represent some thirty freight car loads, which are the only things connected with the building that it would be practical to stretch end to end.

Since the Institute is built on filled land, piles must be driven to give a sufficiently firm foundation. Under the new building there have been driven 2100 of these logs of wood, whose fellow trees might have gone to make the paper this is printed on. If they were the right kind of wood.

The 185,000 square feet of plastering means just that much more work for the Institute's painters. And if Indiana limestone comes from Indiana, then that state will be short some 45,000 cubic feet because of this building."

Some nice construction pictures from the class of 1938 yearbook/website

Map and inhabitants list

mural : "Faces in the crowd became faces on a window as the resultof a project by an MIT graduate student in MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies. Nina M. Frankenheim of Newton, MA, seeking ways to make public places more meaningful, took pictures of students using a stairwell in Building 7 and put the faces - 90 of them - in the foot-square units of the gridwork on the second-floor window." (Tech Talk, June 14 1978)