Steam Café ~ One of MIT's Few Delightful Places

I'm sitting outside the Steam Café at MIT just now. That's the fourth floor space around the inner dome of Lobby 7. It's an attractive place for all sorts of people to pop by; indeed, I've already had three serendipitous meetings with people from Urban Studies, the International Development Initiative, and from Mechanical Engineering. And it's a well-lit space with big windows and great lines of sight so you can see who's about and yet sit at one of the several tables and slurp on some coffee and WiFi. A lot of the core aesthetic and appeal of the Café and environs was established by these two guys, Architecture graduate students Scott Francisco and Nick Senske... As Sasha Brown wrote in her piece Students' idea for new café serves up nicely, this is one of the few cases where MIT actually listened to students and implemented something beautiful and sensible -- and have actually mostly kept it up!