Reinforced concrete rises 18 floors and 277 feet in the Cecil and Ida Green Building, Building 54, home of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. It houses the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) and ranks among the tallest buildings in Cambridge. The tower was designed by I. M. Pei—who earned his bachelor's degree in architecture from MIT in 1940—and Araldo Cossutta, with principal donor Cecil Howard Green, an MIT alumnus who co-founded Texas Instruments.
Raised in reinforced concrete during 1962–1964, the structure rises 18 floors, equivalent to 21 stories, and reaches 277 feet (84 m). Its concrete facade echoes the limestone and concrete of the older MIT buildings nearby. The building’s basement sits below sea level and links into the MIT tunnel system, while three elevators serve its heights.
On both the east and west sides you can see the stair towers: vast windowless expanses broken only by one-story-tall recessed concrete panels. Notice the stair towers on the east and west sides, vast windowless expanses broken only by recessed concrete panels.