Building 20 Site, Massachusetts

Building 20 was the principal building of the secret Radiation Laboratory (Rad Lab), the MIT-based wartime radar research effort which employed almost 4,000 people and occupied 15 acres of floor space in Cambridge, at the peak of its five year existence. Built hurriedly during World War Two, following standardized methods of military construction, city officials exempted Building 20 from building codes, as it was supposed to be torn down once the war was over. It stood for another fifty years, until finally being torn down in 1999 to make way for the Stata Center, a Frank Gehry-designed, Bill Gates-funded structure. Out of this building came technologies which revolutionized the world of radar systems, microwave physics, high-speed photography, acoustics, linguistics, and atomic clocks. It contained faculty offices until it was torn down, including the office of Noam Chomsky.