Rare Early View of MIT

Fine example of William Welles Bosworth bird's-eye view of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, published by the Alumni Association.

Bosworth's view shows MIT from across the River, illustrating the original buildings 1to 10 (excepting 9) and the Great Dome holding a prominent place. The engineering lab is illustrated on the right, with the original athletic field behind it. A number of the buildings shown were never built.

The view likely dates to the 1916 alumni reunion celebrating MIT's move to its current location in Cambridge. A souvenir program of the reunion includes a view of the campus resembling the present view.

William Welles Bosworth (1869 - 1966) was an American architect whose most famous designs include MIT's Cambridge campus, the AT&T Building in New York City, and the Theodore N. Vail mansion in Morristown, New Jersey (1916), now the Morristown Town Hall. Bosworth was also responsible to a large degree for the architectural expression of Kykuit, the famous Rockefeller family estate in Pocantico Hills, New York, working closely with the architects William Adams Delano and Chester H. Aldrich and the interior designer, Ogden Codman.

Rarity

The view is unrecorded, with not examples in OCLC.