Sponge talk
What living in the ugliest building in the United States looks like
Chloe Weng – The Tech
Photo provided by Aaron Lin
Chloe Weng – The Tech
Chloe Weng – The Tech
What do sponges, ducks, and dinosaurs have in common? I have no idea either — ask the ancestors of MIT Simmons Hall, and they might know. Or ask Steven Holl, the architect whose name existed as a constant murmur among Simmons freshmen during the first week. Simmons Hall, my dorm, was the winner of Architectural Uprising’s international 2025 Aesthetic Atrocity Award. You might ask: why is your room shaped like a trapezoid? Why do your shelves have holes in them? Because of the great Steven Holl.
In honor of the Simmons board installing music in the B elevator (instead of actually fixing the problem of it stopping on the eighth floor or the broken first floor button’s light), I’ve decided to write my first Tech article on my favorite things about Simmons after living here for a month.
The elevators!
The strange thing about the Simmons elevators is not entirely the elevators themselves, but where they lead to — or don’t. The entire building is divided into three blocks: A, B, and C. Floors 2, 5, and 6 are the only floors that are continuous among the blocks — otherwise, you can’t take certain elevators to certain sections. As a resident of B Tower (floors 8, 9, and 10 of the B section), I have to go up the elevator of said tower — widely known as “Belevator” — on my journey up.
The A elevator (“Aelevator”), for some reason, does not connect to the public first floor, so we have to share our Belevator with many A block residents. For this reason, and the fact that I live on the tenth floor, Belevator takes about five years to transport me anywhere I want to go. Belevator is the reason I rely on MIT time. Belevator is the overcommitted friend who accidentally sleeps in and never shows up to lecture.
Before the room reassignment process, I was in 3C — C block on the third floor — so I needed the C elevator (“Celevator”) to go up. In contrast to Belevator, Celevator doesn’t dangerously creak on its way up, and it’s devoid of music. Plus, it is much more efficient than Belevator. Celevator is still young and spry.
I don’t think I’ve ever been in Aelevator before, except once to sneak into an A Tower study break, but it exists too.
The windows!
The running joke here is that Simmons residents have more windows in their room than friends. My room has eighteen (do I have more than eighteen friends?), and I’ve heard of other rooms having as many as forty. The actual funny part is that each window has its own mini curtain. You want some privacy? Draw the curtains eighteen times.
The windows are actually not that weird — we get it Steven, you wanted your building to have many holes. It’s the fact that inside the building, people want to add miscellaneous holes everywhere too, from our elevator ceilings to the lights in the dining hall. We are a sponge, inside and out.
The walls!
Pro: The walls are concrete. This means they are free to decorate with our signature chalk! I chalked a Totoro on my curvy wall, and I have plans to fill the rest of it up later, including the second curvy wall in our bathroom.
Each of the lounges has its own chalk mural, and the 7A lounge’s is my favorite, with stunning art of all my favorite Studio Ghibli films. In the inner corner of the lounge, there is written wisdom like “you need to MIT less and self care more,” which is its own form of art.
Con: The walls are curvy. The curviness is cute and quirky, until your room is the one with the curvy wall obstructing half of your otherwise perfectly rectangular room.
On my room reassignment form, I specifically put no curvy walls as my number one important feature for my new room, and sadly, that was not granted to me. (A hallway bathroom was my second most important, and that was somehow denied as well.) In my room, the wall also obstructs part of our floor light, which caused us to buy a floor lamp because our room became so dark at night. (Even more sadly, it’s a forced triple.)
Even with the one con, I can appreciate a good curvy wall every now and then. In addition to having my favorite art, the 7A lounge walls are also the coolest — it makes the place look like a cavern.
The people!
Around half of my friends I talk to on a day-to-day basis are from Simmons. Not to say that I hate all non-Simmons people; I think the people I have met at Simmons are the people I would naturally be drawn to — chill, on the introverted side, but still willing to do weird things together.
I do have to concede we’re lacking a bit of culture compared to many of the other dorms (East Campus, Random Hall, Burton-Connor). Nonetheless, every day that I don’t have lab or club meetings late in the evening, I come to the 7A lounge because there’s nobody else I’d rather study with. After an hour or two, it becomes more like “studying”: creating graphs to rank all the dorms, or complaining about our course workload. It might sound sentimental, but I look forward to being distracted in the Simmons lounge every day.
Like many other freshmen, it feels like everything in my life is changing in an instant, blurred and rushed from the firehose that MIT is. It’s always a relief on my walk back from the Student Center after my classes when I see Simmons in all its spongelike glory — it gives normalcy to the routine, and maybe, at least in a few months, a sense of home.