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Based on the concept of a sponge, Holl’s brainchild attempts to reproduce the “porosity” of the marine body on a grand scale. Accordingly, his design includes five imposing openings that serve as main entrances, view corridors, and outdoor activity terraces. Other openings act as the building’s “lungs,” “bringing natural light in and moving air up.” These lungs include spacious common lounges that are specifically designed to encourage human interaction and, according to author Yehuda Safran, transform the building into “a social condenser in the true sense of the term.” The building’s surface is also saturated with windows, which accentuate the sponge motif.
The CCA’s exhibit is unique in its representation of Holl’s structure. Though glossy photographs of the building are printed on the museum walls, the CCA does not replicate the pompous, technical depictions presented in architecture magazines, which lavish Holl’s award-winning project with praise.
Instead, “Inside the Sponge” presents the residence from an insider’s perspective, provoking a somewhat anomalous response: laughter. A slew of student films and folders filled with accounts of pranks, comic strips from MIT’s student newspaper The Tech, and pictures of students’ favourite hide-outs show visitors that the avant-garde building remains, after all, an undergraduate dorm. And while the materials exposed in the solitary exhibition room – a baffling hodgepodge of binders and Simmons memorabilia – are limited in scope, the CCA offers an accessible gaze at the expensive building of an elite institution: a commendable exercise in demythification.
While critics questioned the conceptual unity of the building, “Inside the Sponge” reveals that students were busy shooting film clips, which ended with tongue-in-cheek equations such as “number of windows in Simmons Hall = 5.538 x 103 = a lot of little curtains.” Reflecting on the porosity of the building, a student in a lab coat who presents himself as Prof. Dan says, “Everywhere they can see outside, they can hear outside, but they can’t get outside…except through this door.” As a commentary on the project’s price tag, (a hefty $120-million, making it the most expensive residence hall ever built in the United States), Prof. Dan directs the viewer’s attention to “this amorphous blob of building’s ceilings,” telling us to observe them carefully as we are, after all, witnessing “several million dollars of ceiling.”
The description of student pranks is probably the most entertaining feature of the exhibit. The story of the “hack” who hung a banner onto the roof “adorned with [Simmon Hall’s] affectionate nickname ‘Waffle House’” is particularly amusing – as is the anecdote about a fleet of yellow rubber duckies’ sporadic nocturnal invasion of Dan Graham’s Yin Yang art installation pavilion.