> "IMO, the best layout I ever saw was the old Tech Square MIT AI Lab (not* the current Geahy monstrosity).""* I think that quoted person has the right idea of

> "IMO, the best layout I ever saw was the old Tech Square MIT AI Lab (not* the current Geahy monstrosity).""* I think that quoted person has the right idea of some of the better ways to do things. But in partial defense of that Gehry building (the Stata Center, which houses the merger of the AI Lab and LCS into CSAIL)... The floors included some of the elements they describe. I shared a nice window office with a postdoc, but ended up working most of the time from a laptop on the moveable tables in a common area of our floor in front of the elevators. That space got used for lunches, random meetings, the occasional laptop worker, after-hours social events, and chance encounters with people passing through. There's also patterns that I'm not sure Tech Square had, like cutouts between floors, wide open staircases that people can pause upon for conversation, big windows, outdoor space, the main street first floor. (I only got to visit 545 Tech Square once before people moved to Stata, and Building 20 right before it was torn down. Both had obvious merits, and all three buildings were very different from each other.)