Floating Theatre

Most Harvard men will modestly concede that architecturally at least, Harvard "has it" over M.I.T. Since last May, however, theatre devotees have revised at least part of this notion and looked wistfully further down the Charles where M.I.T. has begun to build its theatre. Now half built, the auditorium should send Harvard theatre planners scurrying down Massachusetts Avenue in inspection, for the new building is an architectural novelty.

This unique auditorium consists mainly of several hundreds of tons of concrete roof in the shape of a spherical triangle, "floating" on three ball and socket type joints that allow it to wander a little when expanding or contracting. The diminutive walls have to be kept clear of the moving, self-supporting roof. Now swaddled in canvas and scaffolding, the structure looks non-descript in the extreme. But, undaunted by its present mud-pie look, R. M. Kimball, chairman of the building committee, expects "wonderful things" from the auditorium.

"It Floats"

The building was designed in 1951 by the Finnish architect, Eero Saarinen, who is the chief architect for Brandeis and has remodeled the University of Michigan. Planned when the Korean war was going full blast and seemed interminable, Saarinen had to figure out a way to make an auditorium without using too much steel and still not have too many supporting columns. The "floating" concrete roof proved to be the answer. Designed on roughly the same principles as New York's Hayden Planetarium, the auditorium is unique in that there are only three points of support for the dome. In order to support the triangular roof, the theater is wedge-shaped. The main auditorium has no balcony and seats some 1,200 people; while downstairs there is a smaller, sharply pitched theatre which seats only 250.

In their anxiety to build an auditorium both modern and innovating and at the same time not too expensive, M.I.T. has made some significant choices. To save money, the school decided to build the main stage without space for scenery, while the smaller auditorium will have only limited scenery facilities. This decision will rule out plays involving any big change of scene for the main auditorium. Even for the smaller theatre, scene changing will be quite difficult.

Kimball explains this choice by pointing out that most of the plays popular with students will be modern ones which require little or no scenery. "Besides," he explains, "what we're doing is knowingly taxing the ingenuity of the M.I.T. boys when they put on their shows."

Workmen will begin pouring the concrete for the roof on Monday, and the whole auditorium is scheduled to be finished by July. Even aside from designing, it is a curious building, for it indicates a certain state of mind of the builders. In feeling that M.I.T. should innovate architecturally, they have spent the better part of two million dollars in creating a sweeping modern building and then balked at spending the last thousands which would give the stage a flexibility that the unregimented tastes of students demand.