05-17-04.stata-roof-1.jpg
One of the things we discovered while wandering the halls of the Stata Center is, despite the numerous active doorlocks, you could actually go into nearly any room you wanted if you were adventurous enough. For example, the control room for the big 123 lecture hall has a combination lock on it, but it turns out that if you just twist the handle, it opens. Another example is roof access. I assume that, in the future, MIT will want to block access to the roof, but, for now, you can walk up a stairwell and right out onto the roof.
The roof offered many interesting views of Cambridge, the MIT campus, and Boston. It also makes for a fun mini-maze as you try and navigate through the vent-works to get to the outer roof edge.
If you examine the photos carefully, you might be able to notice some mounting stands that are regularly spaced near the edge of the roof. They have four holes in them as if to bolt on something important, but their main use to me was a good solid base to stand on and look over the high roof edge.
Roof Gallery (29 photos)
Related: Index of other Stata Center entries