The Red Line is the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority’s workhorse “T” line—as the Boston-area subways are colloquially known—moving more commuters than any other in the system. Heading south from Alewife Station, in north Cambridge, the Red Line passes by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) before crossing the Charles River to service downtown Boston and the South Shore. Earlier this year, NADAAA and the Boston office of Perkins&Will inaugurated a new headhouse along the line at the Kendall/MIT stop. Despite a rebrand in 1978 to include the institute’s acronym, most signs inside the station still only read “Kendall.” That identity crisis was at the root of the problem.
Unlike the Red Line’s Harvard stop, which opens onto a public square at the edge of that university’s Yard, MIT’s most recognizable symbol—architect William Welles Bosworth’s domed Building 10—is a half-mile away from its respective station. “You’d come up into a CMU bunker and ask: Where’s MIT?” says Harry Lowd, associate at NADAAA. In recent years, that venerable institution has expanded eastward, toward the T stop, replacing parking lots with a burgeoning tech and life-sciences hub. The central question became, as Lowd explains: “How do we design a headhouse and gateway to MIT, but still encourage passage through it and connect the Kendall Square neighborhood with the rest of Cambridge?”
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