Building 20

About

Building 20 (18 Vassar Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts) was a timber structure erected during World War II on the central campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). One of three new buildings used for wartime radar research, it was designed in one day to last until the war's end, but remained a productive research facility until its demolition in 1998.

The three-floor, six-wing structure originally housed the classified projects of the Radiation Laboratory, where fundamental advances were made in physical electronics, electromagnetic properties of matter, microwave physics, and microwave communication principles. It has been called one of America's "two prominent shrines of the triumph of science during the war" (along with the desert installation at Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was born). A former Rad Lab member said, "At one time, more than 20 percent of the physicists in the United States (including nine Nobel Prize winners) had worked in that building".