Site overview
Alumni Pool, designed by Laurence Bernhart Anderson and Herbert Lynes Beckwith and completed in 1939, is recognized as one of the first Modernist buildings constructed on an American college campus. Although the original context has since been significantly altered by later buildings, the pool building was intended as the centerpiece of a "back" court on the MIT campus, and envisioned by the architects to be a nucleus of a much-larger athletic complex. The placement of the main pool volume is such that the south elevation's large wall of glass was originally a natural-light source for the pool, and the adjacent walled garden served as an outdoor sunbathing location in the summer months.