In a joint effort, Goody Clancy & Associates (Boston) and Charles Correa Associates (Bombay, India) created a world-class center for brain research that brought together three distinct research entities within MIT. The building houses a variety of wet and dry laboratories, as well as animal facilities to support biology, biochemistry, neurobiology, behavioral, and cognitive research. At 400,000 square feet, the research complex is the largest facility of its type in the world.

Acentech provided advanced audiovisual systems design expertise for over thirty teaching and learning spaces. These included a 150-seat auditorium and two 75-seat seminar rooms with state-of-the-art, multi-site interactive IP/ISDN videoconferencing systems. Each classroom, conference room, and meeting space was outfitted to accommodate current and future audiovisual technologies, as well as a sound system for the atrium and plasma displays in the circulation areas.

The new building straddles an active railway, which presented an extraordinary challenge for the design team. The entire structure had to be isolated from the noise and vibrations from trains which pass directly through the building. Acentech’s transportation noise engineers used rail-induced vibration data to determine the amount of isolation that would be required to protect the sensitive equipment in the building and to assess the effects of rail vibration on the building’s human and animal occupants.