Page 26 - College Planning & Management, May 2018

that march through the site, branches starting at 20 feet high. While you walk the court, the green and red Adirondack chairs deliver pops of color while providing scale to the colossal trees.
In June 2017, the 12 chairs were in place in Eastman Court. Then, almost by accident, an unofficial club was formed, made up of project contributors including staff from MIT MindHandHeart, the depart- ment of Facilities, and MIT Grounds. We were known unofficially as “The Chair Counters.” By August of that summer, I learned that many of us would take special detours on campus to pass through Eastman to make sure all 12 chairs were still there. Or at least it started that way. After a while, I was more interested in watching how the chairs moved around the area, an observation echoed by other chair coun- ters. A common question was, “Should we put chips on them to track their movements?” The chairs, as expected, were a huge success.
Organic Growth
Within months the Office of Campus Planning and MIT Mind- HandHeart were receiving calls from other departments interested in duplicating what we’d created at Eastman. We soon had more chairs on order for outdoor and interior spaces. In addition to the Adirondack chairs, our moveable furniture portfolio grew to include variably sized
round pedestal tables with matching chairs, as well as some teak furni- ture specifically chosen for more formal campus locations. A year after the debut of the original 12 chairs in Eastman, the movable furniture count has increased to over 30 individual pieces, with more to come.
In the winter of 2017 we moved the Eastman chairs to a build-
ing atrium near MIT Medical. The building manager was eager to house them, and for a reason. At lunch people had been sitting on the atrium’s monumental central staircase, forming impromptu small- group spaces while eating lunch. Now people had a proper place to sit. In fact, this winter storage may have been too successful. A building occupant recently pulled me aside and said, “You’re going to have a hell of a time getting those chairs out of here and back to Eastman.”
From the perspective of this chair counter, that is a nice prob- lem to have. CPM
Todd Robinson, RLA, ASLA, is a campus planner in the Office of Campus Planning (OCP) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (http:// campusplanning.mit.edu). At MIT Todd uses his design experience to help consultants and MIT project teams collaborate successfully. In addition to working on diverse institutional projects, he focuses on developing site and graphic standards for the OCP. He can be reached at toddrobi@mit.edu.
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