Ray and Maria Stata Center

The Ray and Maria Stata Center or Building 32 is a 720000sqft academic complex designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Frank Gehry for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The building opened for initial occupancy on March 16, 2004. It sits on the site of MIT's former Building 20, which had housed the historic Radiation Laboratory, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The building's address is 32 Vassar Street.DescriptionIn contrast to the MIT custom of referring to buildings by their numbers rather than their official names, the complex is usually referred to as "Stata" or "the Stata Center" . Above the fourth floor, the building splits into two distinct structures: the Gates Tower and the Dreyfoos Tower, often called "G Tower" and "D Tower" respectively.The building has a number of small auditoriums and classrooms used by the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department, as well as other departments and on-campus groups. Research labs and offices of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, as well as the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy occupy the upper floors. Academic celebrities such as Noam Chomsky and Ron Rivest, World Wide Web Consortium founder Tim Berners-Lee, and free software movement founder Richard Stallman also have offices in the building.