Occupation

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Building 20 & Building Occupants 1943-1998

Day 1-3
Celebrating Building 20: History researched and written by Nancy Heywood, 4 March 1998, slightly revised 25 March 1998. Read by Laura Convenienceware.

Celebrating Building 20 excerpt:
Building 20 was completed in December 1943 to house part of the Radiation Laboratory (Rad Lab), the successful collaboration between scientists and the military that focused on improving the radar technology that greatly contributed to the Allies' victory in World War II.
In August 1945, the Rad Lab began making preparations for closing its doors. Plans were under way to bring projects to a close, settle personnel contracts, and publish the technological progress and research findings of the lab in the Radiation Laboratory Series. Throughout 1946, the spaces the Rad Lab occupied were cleaned out and the radomes on the roofs were dismantled. However, the buildings were not dismantled. MIT realized that the buildings would be helpful as enrollments increased dramatically. The MIT President Report, 1945- 1946, states, "the Institute space occupied by the war projects has been largely recaptured, and the temporary buildings...have been retained by the Institute to aid us in handling the postwar overload of students." Building 22 was converted into a dormitory, and by 1947 it housed approximately 600 students. Building 20 was to remain useful to MIT as the site of machine shops, research labs, and offices.
…The day after the Radiation Laboratory was officially terminated, 31 December 1945, the Basic Research Division was established, on 1 January 1946. Six months later, the Basic Research Division officially became part of MIT under the newly established Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE).
A campus plan, dated June 1946, describes Building 20 as a "temporary war research building, now used for peacetime educational and research experiments." Building 20's A wing became the primary campus location of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). RLE was an interdisciplinary lab initially comprised of five groups: microwave electronics, microwave physics, modern electronic techniques, microwave communication, and electronic aids to computation. Each research group had space in Building 20 and the lab's headquarters were located in 20A-122. Building 20 also became the first home for another interdisciplinary research organization, the Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS). Various divisions of LNS were located in Building 20: cosmic ray group (20B-124), cyclotron group (20B- 115), theoretical group (20B-213), and the machine shop (20B- 021). Room 20B-119 was location of the headquarters for LNS, and its purchasing office was found down the hall in 20B-129.