The Metropolitan Storage Warehouse (Met Warehouse) on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Vassar Street has long been a familiar presence to the MIT and Cambridge communities. Now, an innovative renovation project is converting this iconic building into a modern hub for interdisciplinary design research and education; a new home for the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, uniting many elements of the school in a single place; and a location for the largest community-wide makerspace on campus, managed by Project Manus.
The adaptive reuse of the Met Warehouse will create 217,000 gross square feet of space for academic, research, gathering, and makerspace purposes, including undergraduate and graduate labs and studios. The Met Warehouse will be the new home for the Department of Architecture, along with research units and studios from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, the Center for Real Estate, and the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.
As our faculty and students demonstrate time and again, design is the bridge between invention and innovation, sparking bold approaches and solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges, from climate change to transportation to public health. The renovation will usher in a new era for design, architecture, urban planning, and entrepreneurship at MIT while adapting a remarkable historic structure for contemporary use.
The design approach for the new Met Warehouse augments the existing structure while addressing the distinct challenges of a building constructed for possessions rather than people.
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As the Institute’s new design hub, the renovated building will establish a dynamic public face for SA+P, bridging the east and west sides of campus.
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