The MIT That Might Have Been

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PRESENTER: The MIT campus, with its domes and pillars, has become iconic. People come from around the world to visit and snap photos. But all of it might have been very different if a century ago, any one of the many competing design plans had been chosen to be built.

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MIT closed the deal to build on the desolate mudflats of Cambridge in 1911. And the architects immediately sharpened their pencils. First up was Stephen Child, who had designed some parks in California, had once been the sewer superintendent of Newton, Massachusetts, and who was an MIT alum. His plan had it all-- a central dome, trees, a giant crossing X of a walkway, and in the middle, a monument based on Versailles' Temple of Love. Unfortunately, the buildings bumped up against the football stadium, which the Student Union Committee, perhaps dreaming of national championships, wanted on the main street of Massachusetts Avenue.

Next up was famed Boston architect, Ralph Adams Cram, who suggested that MIT should live on its own island to be built in the middle of the Charles River.

MARK JARZOMBEK: I mean, he saw this as like Venice, Italy. I mean, we're going to have this sort of water landscape.

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PRESENTER: Things got more serious when MIT's esteemed professor of architecture, Desire Despradelle took over. Despradelle's plans were majestic, imposing, beautiful, and really expensive.

That was a cue for John Ripley Freeman to step in. Freeman, a famous civil engineer and professor at MIT, wanted efficiency and comfort above all. He studied buildings in France, in England, in Germany, and in Virginia. And he concluded that what MIT needed was a factory for learning-- long interconnected hallways, plenty of natural light, and buildings coated in ceramic tile so the coal stains from nearby industry could be washed away daily.

GARY TONDORF-DICK: He also wanted to move the original Rogers Building from the Back Bay and center it in this facility. That was an idea that didn't quite gain traction. But it was kind of an interesting idea.

PRESENTER: Finally, William Welles Bosworth got the job. Bosworth incorporated Freeman's idea of an efficient and comfortable campus into a pleasing and imposing neoclassical structure. And Bosworth's work is still going strong, 100 years on from its opening.

But there's one piece of Bosworth's plan that's missing, a gleaming 40-foot-tall statue of Minerva, Roman goddess of wisdom and war with a reflecting pool beneath. No one would fund it.

MARK JARZOMBEK: I don't know. I mean, even I would boggle, that it's the thought of who would pay for this or what kind of material would it be. I mean, it would have been hugely expensive.

GARY TONDORF-DICK: It was one of the few things that he couldn't convince the Institute to build. Most everything else, he convinced the Institute to do.

PRESENTER: Bosworth never gave up. In a letter to MIT in 1961, Bosworth, then 93, wrote that the great court without Minerva was like appearing in public without a necktie. Planning a tribute to Bosworth later that year, MIT's President Stratton gave what has up until now been the final word. "Anything," he said, "but a statue of Minerva."

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