MIT Opens a 19th-Century Brick Warehouse Reborn as a School of Architecture
A 500-foot-long brick warehouse that once stored pianos, carriages and furs for Boston's wealthiest families has reopened as the new home of MIT's School of Architecture and Planning. MIT's newsroom announced the opening on 12 August 2026, capping a renovation that began planning in December 2018 and took nearly eight years to complete.
The New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro — known for the High Line in Manhattan and the redevelopment of Lincoln Center's campus — led the conversion of the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse, a fortress-like structure on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The building, originally designed in 1894 by local architect Frederic Pope and expanded in four additions by 1916, now provides 195,000 square feet of studios, classrooms and public space across five interconnected volumes, according to Dezeen and The Architect's Newspaper.
The transformation involved what DS+R described as architectural surgery. The studio cut a series of voids along the building's length, removed portions of the heavy masonry floor system, and hung new lightweight floor slabs from steel straps attached to existing beams. That intervention reduced the structural load on the original columns and wood piles, revealing enough reserve capacity to support high-ceilinged, largely column-free studio spaces. DS+R said the approach was informed by the building cuts of Gordon Matta-Clark, the artist known in the 1970s for slicing into abandoned structures.
Inside, some of those cuts were left exposed. Original brick archways running beneath the floor slabs are now visible cross-sections that students walk past on their way to class. The programming is organised into "neighbourhoods" arranged around double-height spaces, all connected by a continuous linear public stair.
On the exterior, DS+R preserved details including the building's corner towers and crenellated corbeled cornices — decorative battlement-like stonework along the roofline. The team also rebuilt crenellated parapets that had been destroyed in 1938, restored the brick facades, and punched new windows into walls measuring two feet thick. Several glazed volumes were spliced onto the original structure. The project is targeting LEED Gold certification, the sustainability standard administered by the US Green Building Council.
The School of Architecture and Planning's Department of Architecture and Department of Urban Studies and Planning are relocating from MIT's neoclassical Building 7, which sits catty-corner to the new site. Ana Miljački, named head of the Department of Architecture in July 2026, was scheduled to lead the department into the new building late this summer, according to MIT's newsroom.
From a planning announcement in December 2018 to a full opening nearly eight years later, the project converts a building that safeguarded other people's belongings into one that trains the people who design the buildings everyone else lives and works in. The warehouse's old labels — the ones that would have tracked which Boston family stored what — are now joined by studio crits and student models.
