In a parking lot next to a nondescript building on the northern edge of MIT’s campus, dozens of enormous foam blocks sit in piles. These are not discarded pieces of packaging from some industrial construction, however. They are models of buildings, and the parking lot is the workshop of Anton Garcia-Abril, a professor of architecture at MIT. Along with his partner, Debora Mesa, Garcia-Abril leads a team that often rearranges the blocks into new shapes. Just beyond the fence, traffic roars by on a busy street, trains sometimes roll through on the nearby railroad tracks, and new commercial buildings are being raised a block or two away. Their own building is a former lab for electricity research. It is exactly the kind of setting Garcia-Abril hoped for when he joined MIT’s Department of Architecture last summer. “When we came here and were invited to participate in the research program, we said, ‘We want a yard,’” Garcia-Abril explains. “We want to build, to test, to feel how spaces comfort you, shelter you, and inspire you.” What Garcia-Abril, Mesa, and their team want to test, most of all, are new forms for urban structures, potentially made out of prestressed concrete, that can
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