When Steve Jobs designed Pixar’s new headquarters (he was Chairman of Pixar at the time) he deliberately designed it in a way that would encourage employee mingling, unplanned encounters and cross-team collaboration. The building has a huge central atrium which traffics staff between different areas, houses communal facilities such as the cafe, cinema, toilets and the gym, and which also acts as a connection between the areas which house the creative, technical and support teams.
I was thinking about this as I read the amazing story of MIT’s Building 20, a temporary three floor structure hastily constructed in 1943 as part of an emergency research effort for the Second World War, and initially housing MIT’s Radiation Laboratory (the ‘Rad Lab’). It was the site where significant advances were made in microwave physics, the electromagnetic properties of matter, and single-antenna radar. Advances which ultimately helped win the war (some physicists have said that it is second only to Los Alamos in this respect).
Yet Building 20 was no flashy, modern innovation campus. It was made of plywood, leaked badly, had poor ventilation, heating control and lighting, bad acoustics and was confusing to find your way around.
Despite falling foul of the fire regulations when it was built, the building was given a reprieve after the war when, due to a lack of space at MIT, it took on another role as a ‘magical incubator’. It became home to a broad spectrum of teams including the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, the Research Laboratory for Electronics, the Solar Electric Vehicle Team, the Adhesives Lab and the Acoustics Lab. Some of the greatest breakthrough innovations and intellectual advancements of the 20th Century emerged from it’s wood and plaster-board labs including modern-theory linguistics, the physics of microwaves, and high-speed photography. Unbelievably, this shabby building, occupied by it’s diverse, irregular group of scientists and engineers, was not replaced until 1998.
Yet it was this very shabbiness, and impermanent form of construction that became one of its greatest strengths. As David Shaffer writes:
‘Probably the most-important reason why there will never again be a Building 20 is its design (or lack thereof). Strangely enough, the very things that made it bad also made it ideal for collaboration and innovation. Thin, wood-stud walls covered modestly by plywood allowed the engineers to manipulate the building for any need. The researchers didn’t have to wait for a new lab facility — they could immediately change the built environment so that it fit their needs. If the scientists needed additional water or electricity, they helped themselves by tapping into the exposed lines and pipes. Furthermore, the building was notoriously hard to navigate. This would often lead occupants astray into different offices and laboratories and provide chance opportunities for intellectual discussion. These informal hallway discussions would often lead to cross-departmental collaboration on new projects.‘
Shaffer gives the example of Amar Bose, who would hang out in the acoustics lab when he was avoiding writing his dissertation. The more he hung out there the more interested he became in the work that the acoustics engineers were doing. Eventually, with their help, he invented a unique new speaker and ultimately went on to found the Bose Corporation. The building housed nearly 4,000 researchers from 20 different scientific and engineering fields. Shaffer remarks how unusual it was for different scientific disciplines and labs, which would normally be housed in separate departmental facilities, to be brought together in one building. Noam Chomsky did his pioneering work in generative grammar and modern linguistics there. Teams that worked on particle accelerators, worked alongside others that explored cosmic microwave backgrounds, ones that built anechoic chambers and others that repaired pianos.
The temporary nature of the building allowed a far greater degree of flexibility for the occupants (far more than you would ever get in a rigid office environment) to remodel or hack together new spaces as their work required. As Shlomit Okon puts it in her post:
‘Stewart Brand refers to Building 20 in his study “How Buildings Learn”, as a “low road” structure that, similar to the Silicon Valley garage, was a type of space that is so unwanted and under-designed that it’s unusually creative. Scientists in Building 20 were free to remake their rooms, customizing the structure to fit their needs, as there was no permission needed to tear down walls and equipment was stored everywhere.‘
She notes how the complexity of the layout meant that scientists from different fields would often bump into each other, sparking informal conversations about their work (something urban theorist Jane Jacobs has described as ‘knowledge spillovers’).
Building 20 may well have been a complete one-off but ultimately it is a story of innovation. A story that teaches us about the value of having a greater flexibility in the environments that we create for creativity and innovation. About the value of productive informality. But above all it teaches us about the value of inter-disciplinary collaboration and bringing together diverse perspectives in new and interesting ways.
In his book ‘Where Good Ideas Come From’, Steven Johnson talks about how multiple ‘half ideas’ – hunches that there is a better way of doing something, partial solutions or incomplete concepts – often exist within large organisations. It is, says Johnson, the collision of these ‘half ideas’ that frequently forms the basis for breakthrough thinking. There is a lot more that most organisations can do to create not only productively informal collaboration and conversations, but productively informal environments that can truly help ideas come to life.
Image: By MIT Museum – CC BY 3.0
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