MIT in a recent up gradation to the courses provided at its campus has opened doors of its MIT Media Lab Complex that is institute’s most famous interdisciplinary program. The Media Lab Complex is created by architect Fumihiko Maki and his Maki and Associates firm. Fumihiko Maki is a winner of the Pritzker Price for architecture. Seven cube-shaped labs with glass walls surround a common atrium filled with natural light.

The design of the building is inspired by artists Piet Mondrian and George Seurat as wells as the arts of Japanese paper lanterns. The white, glass, and aluminum building has touched with primary colors red, blue, and yellow, which are often found in Mondrian’s paintings.

The MIT Media Lab Complex design, which MIT had itself pledged to be made around glass walls, has been modified to Cambridge energy requirements which prohibit use of glass construction in buildings. As following the Cambridge university norms Maki and his team integrated translucent aluminum screens over the buildings many glass and solid walls.

The screens over glass create a slightly pixelated view of the Charles River and Boston skyline while taking the view outside the building from within the building. When Media Lab Complex at night, viewed from outside then it creates semi-translucent views into some labs, the overall effects proves hint about a giant Japanese paper lantern popped down on the corner of Ames and Amherst Streets in Cambridge.

Maki and his team also have developed series of literal think tanks filled with professors, students, computers, and robots all working in unison on future technology. The cube themselves, is now referred as labs, has same creative and colorful preschool feel of the original Wiesner cube.

Apart from MIT Media Lab, the building is also housing MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, the Jerome Lemelson Center for Inventive Thinking and the Okawa Center for Future Children. The building also has a digital fabrication and machine shop, a lecture hall, a winter garden, a cafe, and conference rooms.