Located fifty meters directly east of Eero Saarinen's MIT Chapel, this museum for the mechanical arts was inspired by Denis Diderot's encyclopedic plate: Figure 19, Grosses Forges, Lavage de la Mine, and designed as a reaction and counterpart to Saarinen's circular masterpiece.
The museum attempts to draw form from the Diderot plate, with four "moving gears" determining the circulation and public spaces; the visitors are "worked" into the central space by the gears.
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The conceptual museum features exhibition rooms, classrooms, interactive machine space, a large courtyard directly mirrored from the chapel, and finally a key elevated presentation space.
