39 windows and 2 friends by Boheng C. '28

last year, i lived in simmons hall. simmons is known for many things at MIT — its rubber ducks, its chalk, its residents’ chronically online doomscrolling — but first and foremost among them, its architecture:

many of MIT’s buildings have their own quirks and eccentricities. none of them, with the possible exception of stata, can rival simmons. whether you think simmons is a masterpiece of postmodernism or an aesthetic atrocity, whether it’s tastefully provocative or just an eyesore, simmons has become unequivocally one of the most recognizable buildings on campus.

there’s a lot to unpack in this building, so let’s start with the windows. simmons has 5538 of them — five thousand five hundred thirty eight individual panes of glass — arranged in a meticulous rectangular grid. each floor has a height of three windows, so when you look at the building from afar, you might be tempted to think that there’s a forty-story behemoth towering over vassar street. contrary to appearances, simmons has just ten floors.

my room last year, which i shared with my two roommates, had 39 windows — three rows of thirteen windows each. even by simmons standards, this is a prodigious number. we only had so many windows because we lived in a large triple room at the very corner of the building; most double rooms have only around 20 windows.

what is it like to live with thirty-nine windows? well, you get used to it. and then you start taking things for granted. you take it for granted, for example, that your room gets inundated with bountiful voluminous sunlight cascading in from every direction with every sunset, even during the winter. you take it for granted that you need a makeshift coordinate system to refer to each window (“the fifth bottom window from the left wall”); you take it for granted that you forget which window had the broken hinge or the missing curtain. you take it for granted that there are windows behind every desk and cabinet and bed. you take it for granted that you have dozens of options to choose from when you look out over briggs field or dorm row or the charles river. you take things for granted until the day on which you move out and return home and stare wistfully out your single bedroom window, wondering what you lost.

of course, windows are not the only whimsical part of simmons. less obvious from the outside are all the curved concrete walls on the inside. sadly, our room didn’t have any, but most of the lounges in simmons have curved walls, as do the hallways and rooms adjacent to the lounges:

and you can draw on the concrete walls (curved or non-curved) to your heart’s content! even though housing and residential services has been clamping down on student artwork in recent years, the chalk drawings of simmons seem to have survived mostly unscathed.

the curved walls are everything a wall should be and shouldn’t be at the same time. they add depth and frivolity and they make furniture difficult to align; they contrast with the rigid window grid that governs simmons’s exterior. they make rooms have all sorts of deeply accursed shapes that undermine your basic conception of what a room should look like:

floor plan of room 729. the curved space labeled OTB is a lounge on the other side of the wall. no, i don’t know if you can fit a bed in the right half of the room; no, i don’t know how people live in this room. (if you live/have lived here, please please please tell me in the comments!!)

and then, of course, there are all the colors. simmons’s window frames are colored red, green, blue, and yellow on the outside. but these same colors also pervade the dorm interior, adorning the walls of suites and alcoves in the hallways. the rooms themselves lack color, and the walls are mostly gray concrete, feebly illuminated by a few lights that point towards the ceiling. simmons rooms are very dark. haters say that the stark aesthetics give prison vibes; i think that the darkness juxtaposes nicely with the bright hallway colors and the window illumination.

simmons is often affectionately referred to as the sponge, both because of its windows and its other forms of porosity. the aforementioned lounges carve out cavernous multi-story spaces, which let conversations resonate and sunlight filter through. every floor except for the second, fifth, and sixth floors are discontinuous in some way; that is, the building has gaps separating the hallway into multiple pieces. the third and fourth floors, for instance, are partitioned in two by a vast hole that stretches the width of multiple rooms. on the top three floors, the three towers (called a, b, and c) split off from each other and the hallways are no longer contiguous.

cross-sectional sketch of simmons during the planning phase (from steven holl architects); slanted vertical gray sections are lounges/common spaces

the design of the hallways — some stretching the entire length of the building, others truncated by gaps — create social dynamics that are hard to find in other dorms. the longer hallways are cosmopolitan and connect dozens of people; residents often have access to multiple lounges, common spaces, or laundry rooms⁠01 simmons’s laundry rooms are spread throughout the building; each has just two washing machines and two dryers on their own floor. on the other extreme, my own floor (the a tower section of the tenth floor) has just a handful of rooms and no common spaces whatsoever. it’s very cozy and self-contained though, and it lacks the liminal horror of a hundred-meter hallway stretching into the far distance. you could get to know everyone on the floor if you wanted to!

hallway of medium length

located in the space between these towers, on the seventh and eighth floors, are small terraces with a smattering of benches and tables. you can go up there and talk with friends or lie down and stare at the sky. it’s intoxicating to be so high above the street and the trees and all the people walking past underneath, to feel the cold rarefied exhilarating wind.

view from 8ab terrace at midnight

of course, simmons’s divergent sense of whimsy also brought challenges. the large number of windows meant that our room struggled to retain heat during the winter; the panes of glass offered little insulation. our two heaters were dramatically inadequate, since they had no fans or active circulation but merely conducted heat into the room.

and then there was the window, located behind a cabinet connected to a bunk bed, that we opened when we first moved into the room. it made the room less stuffy during the sweltering august afternoons; in november, it became a nightmare. it began to let in drafts of freezing air, so we had to move the entire bunk bed and all the furniture around it just to shut this obstinate last window.

being a resident of a tower, simmons’s maze-like layout meant that our elevator didn’t even have a direct connection to the main entrance. on the first floor, it led to the kitchen and rear exit, which were separated from the entrance by the dining hall. we had to traverse the entire length of our building and take two different elevators, or a flight of stairs followed by an elevator, just to get to our room.

but you would be wrong if you thought that i despise simmons for its architectural irregularities. to the contrary, i love it for all its whimsy and quirks and manifold flaws. when i’m struggling on a pset problem or an essay late at night, when i’m stressed for a midterm, when i’m on the verge of breakdown or just plain tired, i try to look around myself. i realize again that i live in a building with twisted curvy walls and broken hallways and five thousand windows, and everything becomes fine again, all because of this accursed clownhouse of a dorm.