The challenge in expanding MIT's world-renowned Wiesner Building, home of the MIT Media Lab, was to increase its size without altering its dynamics. A team headed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Fumihiko Maki and executive architects Leers Weinzapfel Associates designed an ingenious connecting structure that supports ongoing research and maximizes interaction and collaboration. The new building – six floors with approximately 163,000 square feet of laboratory, office, and meeting space – links to Wiesner, which was designed by I.M. Pei and Partners in 1985.

Both functionally advanced and architecturally distinguished, the complex is an ideal home for technological innovation, design, and the arts at MIT. Inside the new structure’s airy glass and metal framework, nine flexible laboratories are organized around a soaring central atrium. Clustering rows of offices around the labs encourage creative interaction, and transparent partitions offer extended sightlines through the building in every direction, allowing multiple activities to be seen from any vantage point. The building also contains top-floor event and display spaces, lecture and conference rooms, and a cafe – all overlooking the Charles River and the Boston skyline.

The completed Media Lab complex houses a unique, cross-disciplinary intellectual community that includes the Office of the Arts, the Council for the Arts, the List Visual Arts Center, the SA+P's Design Lab and Center for Advanced Visual Studies, the Department of Architecture's Visual Arts Program, as well as MIT's Program in Comparative Media Studies. In addition, the building incorporates the Okawa Center for Future Children, made possible by a $27 million donation from Isao Okawa, Chairman of CSK Corporation and Sega Enterprises Ltd.