Cambridge, Massachusetts

Kendall/MIT Gateway, designed by Nadar Tehrani of NADAAA in collaboration with Perkins & Will, serves as a prominent new entrance to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus and integrates seamlessly with the Kendall Square MBTA station reflecting both urban and architectural innovation, offering a striking landmark for students, visitors, and commuters.

Over the past two decades Kendall Square has developed from an area of parking lots and industrial brown fields into a new center within the Boston/Cambridge metropolis.

This has created an opportunity to define and transform the threshold between East Cambridge and MIT’s campus at Main Street with a gateway and a new public open space.

The plan included a commission for a new gateway canopy that connects Main Street and the new open space—hosting the MBTA Kendall/MIT subway stop.

The Kendall/MIT Gateway creates a threshold that acknowledges the depth of the block from Main Street all the way into the campus, a condition that few gateways have historically been asked to address.

For its conceptual design, the Kendall/MIT Gateway by NADAAA has recently been awarded a 2024 American Architecture Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.

The infrastructure of the project consists of the subway rail line, the concourse underground, as well as three modes of access to the street level. To maintain the porosity of the site the idea was to use the thinnest possible columns, each rising 25 feet from the ground.

Conceived as a canopy with many intricate parts, the tolerances for making such bespoke connections posed many challenges.

Our outreach to the maritime and aviation industry turned out to be the most critical and practical path towards the coordination of a complex set of systems into one single buildable shell.

A classical threshold into the site would have created a gate parallel to Main Street, effectively a triumphal arch into the site.

However, the depth of this entry point into campus is over 200 feet deep. For this reason, the gateway is formed less around the width of this threshold, but rather its depth, in the form of a canopy.

The canopy is attenuated at the north and south ends, bringing the canopy to two points, directing views in and out of campus.

The infrastructure of the subway station is covered with a stone carpet of granite pavers which forms the foundation for a still life: a triad of headhouses.

These “icebergs” are an embodiment of the underground programs surging above the ground plane.

Unlike typical subway headhouses that are optimized by creating a singular volume that incorporates the elevators, staircases, and escalators, the Kendall/MIT headhouse is disaggregated into three vertical elements to create a more porous ambulatory for pedestrian flow into campus.

Fabricated in two halves the formwork only needed to be created once. The monocoque is composed of a composite shell, incorporating lateral and intermittent longitudinal ribs.

While the underbelly surface is flat, the roof surface is pitched (invisible to the eye from the street level), incorporating the drainage gutter on the two edges.

The columns are not merely holding up the canopy; in fact they are holding it down from lift forces. Thus, the columns are working in both tension and compression.

A traditional organization of these columns would have them equally spaced at the perimeter of the canopy at about a 10-foot spacing.

However, given the complexities of the infrastructure below, the structural foundations, and urban potentials above ground, the recalibration of column locations initiated what appears to be a more random distribution of columns around both the edge and the center of the canopy.

The canopy ceiling panels form a series of striations running east/west filled with columns, lighting, and other mechanical needs.

The canopy construction process involved the construction of a wooden formwork; the overlay of a composite system composed of a honeycomb shell with fiberglass and carbon fiber composites created with a vacuum bagging process; the insertion of the lateral bracing which conforms to the erratic column locations; and resin, powder coating, and waterproofing layers.

Project: Kendall/MIT Gateway
Architects: NADAAA Inc.
Lead Architect: Nadar Tehrani
Associate Architects: Perkins & Will
General Contractor: Turner Construction Company
Client: MITIMCO / MIT
Photographers: John Horner