The Boston Chapters: What Lies Beneath...

Breathing in the fresh spring-time morning air, I watched cyclists go by me ever so frequently on my little walk towards campus from the residential dorm, Burton Conner. Cycling was apparently a big part of the culture in Boston, especially on the Cambridge side of the river, which was essentially a university town.

Not knowing what to expect, I only arrived at the street across the main buildings after a little bit of directional probing, something I was all-too-familiar with, as I remembered telling Michelle the very words, "It's an English speaking country, anything we are not sure of, we can always ask."

Majestically standing across the road were the large stone columns that held the foundations of the west-side building of one of THE most renowned Technological Universities in THE WORLD, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or more commonly known as, MIT.

Entering the building, I realized that I had no idea where exactly IN the building I was supposed to go. So, as I wandered around the hallways of the interior of the complex, my improvising mind was looking for people or places in which I could possibly get some information or access to my email from.

Aimless wandering took me out into the central front yard of the campus, where I stood in front of the proverbial Dome of the main building. Often seen as a distinctive trademark associated with the MIT acronym, the Central Dome has been known to have been subjected to all forms of student "abuse."

In a school where the word "hacking" originated from, there is a culture to do crazy things referred to as "hacks" as part of the school's culture. Apparently, there was a particular hack that had a police car literally placed at the top of said dome.

Wandering until Lady Luck showered her pity on me by setting up a chance occurrence with Michelle and gang, I was finally able to follow them to the intended location. Winding through the corridors, and climbing up the stairs was a little underwhelming; entirely due to the fact of the decor of the campus and the facilities within it.

For one of the leading technological universities of the world, one would probably hold expectations of spiffy, hi-tech stuff in the details of the facilities and buildings around campus; yet, none of these were really present. The halls were colored in pale brown and beige and the doors of the offices along the corridors totally blended in to give the building its archaic feel, both on the inside and the outside.

A tour around the campus only further reinstated this point. But what the campus lacked in sleekness, it more than made up for it in terms of heritage. Most buildings spotted uniformly brown / beige exteriors, yet architecturally different enough from one another to be able to almost intuitively tell them apart.

More importantly, most of the buildings had their own little stories to go along with their identities; be it the Green Building's (bottom left) tale to work around the limit to the number of stories, or the Stata Center's (bottom right) unique and instantly recognizable architecture; these little tales associated with the buildings themselves, in addition to all the traditions and stories of its interiors, such as the Eastman Nose or the Infinite Corridor, are what sum up to give the school its prestigious culture and identity. And the bottomline is, no amount of fanciful hi-tech, savvy architecture build atop those grounds can actually account for What Lies Beneath it all.

The Room