The Maths and Social Sciences Building is a vacant high-rise tower in Manchester, England. It was part of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) until that university merged with the Victoria University of Manchester, to form the University of Manchester, in 2004. It was vacated by the university in 2010 and is awaiting demolition.
The MSS Building was built in 1968, as part of the UMIST campus. Constructed from reinforced concrete and designed by architects Cruikshank and Seward, it has fifteen stories and an overall height of 49 metres (161 ft), making it the tallest building on the former UMIST campus. Unlike many Brutalist architecture on university campuses of that period, the building deviates from a purely cuboid outline with decorative towers at either end (now used as convenient locations for mobile phone antennae) and the floors up to the 10th being larger, which also breaks up the outline. The building was used largely for staff offices, with some teaching rooms. The 10th to 14th floors (called floors M–Q) accommodated the Department of Mathematics. The "Social Sciences" in the building's name indicates that the building once housed the Management Department, but in recent years the Department of Computation occupied the lower floors of the building. They were to become the School of Informatics in the new university and have since been split between the Schools of Computer Science and Manchester Business School. A two-floor annex to the MSS building connected to the ground floor houses tiered lecture theatres.
It was built on the site of cramped terraced housing that accommodated factory workers that was studied by Friedrich Engels in his book The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.
The new, merged University of Manchester announced in June 2007 that it plans to sell the Mathematics and Social Sciences Building. In July 2007, School of Mathematics relocated from MSS as well from the Ferranti building and the temporary buildings Newman and Lamb, to the new purpose-designed Alan Turing Building. Later in 2007, the staff of the former School of Informatics relocated, some of them to the Lamb building vacated by the mathematicians.
Famous quotes containing the words social, sciences and/or building:
“This is no argument against teaching manners to the young. On the contrary, it is a fine old tradition that ought to be resurrected from its current mothballs and put to work...In fact, children are much more comfortable when they know the guide rules for handling the social amenities. It’s no more fun for a child to be introduced to a strange adult and have no idea what to say or do than it is for a grownup to go to a formal dinner and have no idea what fork to use.”
—Leontine Young (20th century)
“The sciences have ever been the surest guides to virtue.”
—Frances Wright (1795–1852)
“There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)