page_title: Housing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
section_title: Baker House
hierarchical_section_title: Housing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology / Undergraduate dorms / Baker House
caption_attribution_description: MIT Baker House Dormitory, 1946–1949, Alvar Aalto, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Memorial Drive, Cambridge, Massachusetts
context_page_description: Housing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology consists of eleven undergraduate dormitories and nine graduate dorms. All undergraduate students are required to live in an MIT residence during their first year of study. Undergraduate dorms are usually divided into suites or floors, and usually have Graduate Resident Assistants, graduate students living among the undergraduates who help support student morale and social activities. Many MIT undergraduate dorms are known for their distinctive student cultures and traditions.
  Both undergraduate and graduate dorms have a resident Head of House, usually a member of the MIT faculty, living in a special apartment suite within the building. Some larger dorms have multiple Heads of House, each responsible for a section of the building, who consult together on building-wide issues.
  McCormick Hall is a women-only dorm; all other dorms are coeducational. Eastgate and Westgate are designated for graduate student family housing, and all other dorms are reserved for single students.
context_section_description: Baker House, located at 362 Memorial Drive, is a co-ed dormitory at MIT designed by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto in 1947–1948 and built in 1949. Its distinctive design has an undulating shape which allows most rooms a view of the Charles River, and the dining hall features a "moon garden" roof. Aalto also designed custom furniture for the building's rooms, many of which are wedge-shaped. Baker House was renovated for its fiftieth anniversary in 1999, modernizing the plumbing, telecommunications, and electrical systems and removing some of the interior changes made over the years that were not in Aalto's original design.
  The dorm was named after Everett Moore Baker, an MIT Dean of Students, who died in a plane crash in India in 1949. The dormitory houses 318 undergraduates in single, double, triple, and quadruple rooms.
  A Baker House tradition involves dropping an old worn-out piano from the roof. Started by former Baker resident Charles Bruno in 1972, the piano is dropped on Drop Day—the last day MIT students can drop a class with no penalty.
  Notable Baker House alumni include Kenneth Olsen (Electrical Engineering, 1950), co-founder of Digital Equipment Corporation; Amar Bose (Electrical Engineering, 1951), founder of the Bose Corporation and inventor of numerous audio technologies; Alan Guth (Physics, 1968), astrophysicist and professor of physics at MIT; Timothy Carney (1966), former US Ambassador to Sudan and Haiti; Gerald Sussman (Mathematics, 1968), professor of computer science at MIT; Geoffrey A. Landis (Physics and Electrical Engineering, 1980), NASA scientist and science fiction writer; Ronald T. Raines (Chemistry and Biology, 1980), professor of chemistry at MIT; Cady Coleman (Chemistry, 1983), NASA Astronaut; Wes Bush (1983), former Chairman and CEO, Northrop Grumman; Warren Madden (1985), Weather Channel meteorologist; Jonathan Gruber (Economics, 1987), healthcare economist and political advisor; Charles Korsmo (Physics, 2000), actor in movies such as Hook and Can't Hardly Wait; Ed Miller (Physics and Electrical Engineering, 2000), noted poker authority; and Katy Croff Bell (Ocean Engineering, 2000), National Geographic ocean explorer.
caption: Front facade of Baker House
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