Baker House (W7)
Baker House, located at 362 Memorial Drive, is a co-ed dormitory at MIT designed by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto in 1947—1948 and built in 1949. Its distinctive design has an undulating shape which allows most rooms a view of the Charles River, and gives many of the rooms a wedge-shaped layout. The dining hall features a "moon garden" roof that is also very distinctive. Aalto also designed furniture for the rooms. Baker House was renovated for its fiftieth anniversary, modernizing the plumbing, telecommunications, and electrical systems and removing some of the interior changes made over the years that were not in Aalto's original design.
The dorm was named after Everett Moore Baker, an MIT Dean of Students, who died in a plane crash in India in 1949. The dormitory houses 318 undergraduates in single, double, triple and quadruple rooms. Baker's dining halls are open to all MIT students Sunday through Thursday.
Dropping a piano from the roof was started by former Baker resident Charles Bruno ’74 in 1972 and was resumed as an annual tradition in 2005.
Notable Baker House alumni include Kenneth Olsen (Electrical Engineering, 1950), co-founder of Digital Equipment Corporation; Amar Bose (Electrical Engineering, 1951), founder of the Bose Corporation and inventor of numerous audio technologies; Alan Guth (Physics, 1968), astrophysicist and professor of physics at MIT; Timothy Carney (1966), former U.S. Ambassador to Sudan and Haiti; Gerald Sussman (Mathematics, 1968), professor of computer science at MIT; Geoffrey A. Landis (physics, Electrical Engineering, 1980), NASA scientist and science fiction writer; Cady Coleman (1983), NASA Astronaut; Wesley Bush (1983), Chairman and CEO, Northrop Grumman; Warren Madden (1985), Weather Channel meterorologist; Jonathan Gruber, healthcare economist and political advisor (Economics, 1987); Charles Korsmo (Physics, 2000), actor in movies such as Hook and Can't Hardly Wait; and Ed Miller, noted poker authority.
In the summer of 2009, Baker House alumni held a reunion to celebrate Baker's 60th Anniversary which received a Great Dome award from the MIT Association of Alumni and Alumnae.
Read more about this topic: List Of Massachusetts Institute Of Technology Undergraduate Dormitories
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