MIT Museum

"Zoom out. What’s this place all about? Nerdy in the best way possible, this museum devoted to STEAM—science, technology, engineering, art, and math, i.e., MIT’s bread and butter—lets you geek out with a whole bunch of hands-on, interactive exhibits that seek to make the theoretical practical and the highly conceptual understandable. In 2022, the fifty-year-old institution moved into a brand-new, purpose-built space in the heart of the university’s Kendall Square campus in Cambridge, just across the Charles River from Boston proper. It now tempts visitors with a whopping 56,000 square feet of super-engaging, beautifully designed space over three floors. A museum's permanent collection is its defining feature: How was this one? The museum boasts a one-and-a-half-million-piece permanent collection of items—from computers to games to photographs—selections from which rotate into and out of the “MIT Collects” gallery on the third floor. This space is divided into several thematic areas to highlight the role that the university, its faculty, its students, and other folks affiliated with it have played in a range of topics. These themes change from time to time and have included the computations needed for the 1969 lunar landing and the role of play in scientific and mathematical discovery. Exhibits keep us coming back. What can we expect? Temporary exhibitions, curated by the museum but mounted in large part using borrowed pieces, vary in scope and subject from artificial intelligence and machine learning to kinetic sculpture, Minecraft to solar-powered cars, architecture to genetic engineering to photography. There’s also a mostly kid-facing drop-in maker space on hand, with frequently changing activities and construction projects facilitated by museum educators. It’s open weekdays from 2:30 to 4:30pm. A monthly series of “After Dark” evening events is for the twenty-one-and-over crowd. What did you make of the crowd? The museum tends to attract a broad swath of ages, from middle school on up to senior citizens—though school vacation periods do bring in a younger, elementary school–aged crowd, too. The exhibitions have plenty of appeal for adults as well, and the new space—in a buzzed-about larger building and with strong street presence—has attracted a bigger audience, especially for its lecture, panel discussion, and event program. This place is definitely not just for those with prior in-depth knowledge of the topics it covers, and the diversity of the audience bears that out. On the practical tip, how were the facilities? Stairs and elevators connect all the floors, with the stairs themselves blending into stadium-style seating both from the street-level lobby up to the first gallery floor and then from there up to the top story. These seats provide great spots to take a rest, if needed, as do benches throughout the museum. There’s not a prescribed path, per se, telling you where you have to start, but the galleries sort of flow from one to the next in a spiral as you head up. Any guided tours worth trying? Generally speaking, no tours here—though during major school vacation weeks, the museum has offered some kid-facing guided experiences. Gift shop: obligatory, inspiring—or skip it? The on-site boutique makes a great spot to score a Boston souvenir for the budding Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, or Katherine Johnson in your life. You’ll find plenty of MIT shwag plus toys and games that put the fun in STEAM—petite telescopes, build-your-own mini robots. It’s a particular sort of adult who might enjoy the socks with the face of Archimedes knitted into them, but if you know someone who’d want a pair, you’ll find them here. Is the café worth a stop? The museum doesn’t have its own restaurant or coffee bar, but it shares the first floor of the building it’s in with a branch of Boston’s Ripple Café, which serves Counter Culture coffee and Mem Teas plus pastries and sandwiches; and an outpost of Row 34, whose menu has some of the best seafood in Boston. Any advice for the time- or attention-challenged? You could see it all in a tight forty-five minutes, if you really had to, but better to save more like ninety." - Elizabeth Wellington