The Media Lab occupies a six-floor structure with approximately 163,000 square feet of laboratory, office, and meeting space designed by the Tokyo-based architectural firm of Maki and Associates. Together with the existing Wiesner Building (designed by MIT alumnus I. M. Pei), the complex serves as a showplace for new concepts in design, communications systems, and collaborative research. The goal is to ignite a new energy and connectivity within the two-building complex, and then extend this energy beyond our walls—to our sponsors and to the world at large.
The complex also houses the List Visual Arts Center, the School of Architecture + Planning's Program in Art, Culture and Technology, the Arts at MIT, and MIT's Program in Comparative Media Studies.