Mary Jo Olenick is this month’s Buildings & Grounds guest blogger.

The Brain and Cognitive Sciences Building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Photos by Donna Coveney/MIT News Office)

Last week I talked about the need for residential architecture to respond to how today’s students really live. Recently I visited two totally different facilities that highlight the need for a more humanistic response in nonresidential buildings as well.

I toured MIT’s new Brain and Cognitive Sciences Building, designed by Charles Correa Associates, with a group from Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. After our tour we walked through Frank Gehry’s Stata Center, which is directly across the street. Aesthetics and recent publicity aside, the contrast in occupancy levels and human energy was stunning.

Brain and Cog is organized around a large, light-filled atrium. It’s a beautiful space, and the building respects all the tenets we learned in architecture school—clarity of idea, strong design concept, rigorous planning carried through to highly resolved details—but it seems indifferent to human comfort. It was absolutely vacant. Not a stitch of furniture, no pictures on the wall, not a single person. Folks who were involved with the project from the design phase say the atrium was envisioned as the place that would promote interaction among the three distinct research groups occupying the building. Instead it feels like a DMZ.

I also heard that strict limits were placed on furnishing and accessorizing the space, and so far the users have respected those limits. But apparently that is about to change. It will be interesting to see how the space can be made habitable and whether benefits result from the desired interaction.

Unlike Brain and Cog, the Stata Center is not about clarity of form and organization, beautifully resolved details, or spatial poetry. It is, however, a building that exudes human energy. To walk although the interior street is to experience the vitality of the MIT community. Granted, the building benefits from being sited on a major pedestrian artery, as well as from a program that includes such public magnets as a fitness center, a child-care center, a cafe, and a variety of classrooms. But it also breaks many of the rules of public-space design that are followed at Brain and Cog without much success.

Stata Center’s interior street offers very little natural light. Wayfinding is a disaster because of the many twists and turns the route takes. And although it’s double-height for much of its length, the street is not readily perceived in its entirety from any one spot. But the place is teeming with life. My colleague Bob Pulito observed that the popularity of the Stata environment suggests we have not journeyed too far from our caveman roots. The angled walls, crevice-like forms, and stalactite-like structural elements do feel cavelike in places. Thanks to the trademark MIT blackboards, there are even the occasional hieroglyphics.

There is a place for monumentality in civic architecture. However, colleges and universities are all about leveraging human capital. Buildings can play an important role in influencing human behavior if they are relevant to how we live our lives. Activating public spaces for today’s purposeful and highly connected students and faculty members is less about the beauty and purity of the environment and more about functionality and human behavior. Public places should be infused with purposeful spaces that are designed to support specific functions, rather than to be generic gathering areas. Successful buildings should be more than just pretty faces.

That’s a tall order. But if architecture were easy, a caveman could do it.

Mary Jo Olenick is an architect who leads the S/L/A/M Collaborative’s higher-education practice. She will contribute occasionally to Buildings & Grounds during March.

A detail view of the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Building

Another detail view of the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Building