On Wednesday September 30^th, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) held a dedication ceremony for its recently renovated Met Warehouse, a historic building reimagined as a groundbreaking hub for the practice of art and design within the venerable university campus.

Held within the building’s Sidara Auditorium, the ceremony crowned the exceptional adaptive reuse project, launched in 2018 with Sidara’s support, to renovate the Met Warehouse into the new home of the university’s School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P). 

Within the renovated Met Warehouse, two central public spaces – the Sidara Auditorium and the Sidara Gallery – were dedicated to honour a long-standing partnership between Sidara and MIT and to recognise Sidara’s support for the renovation project since its inception. “At Sidara, we share MIT’s commitment to improving lives, solving critical challenges, and making room for cultures to shine,” Sidara Chairman and CEO Talal Shair said in a statement to MIT News. “We feel a profound resonance with SA+P across all three dimensions — so it was only fitting that we would support the transformation of the Met into a hub for education, research, and innovation. We trust the Sidara Auditorium and the Sidara Gallery will serve as spaces for idea exchange, inspiring future generations to think broadly and act boldly.”

Tracing its origins back to 1884, the Met Warehouse originally served as a massive private storage facility, instantly remarkable due to its two-foot-thick brick walls that stretch 500 feet and rise five stories. The renovation preserved many of the warehouse’s structural features, while overhauling its interiors to create top-to-bottom glass sheets and skylights for abundant natural light, double-height design studios, an auditorium, a large entrance lobby, building-long open corridors on all five floors, a central connecting staircase, a ground-floor café, offices and numerous flexible and reconfigurable classroom spaces designed to cater to MIT’s thriving and dynamic faculty and student community. The warehouse will also be the home of the MIT LUMA Lab, which is dedicated to projects combining art, science, technology, conservation, and design.

A long-standing partnership

In 2018, Sidara CEO Talal Shair had signed a collaboration agreement with MIT’s SA+P supporting the renovation of the historic warehouse as well as the design of over 18,580 m² worth of space for facilities including classrooms, an auditorium, workshop areas, and studios. The collaboration agreement also stipulated that Dar and SA+P would come together to engage in research on the future of cities and urban areas.

Since then, Dar and MIT have collaborated on numerous research initiatives and projects. In 2023, the sixth biennale architecture exhibition Time Space Existence featured the “Rebuilding Beirut: Using Data to Co-Design a New Future” exhibit, showcasing research conducted by the MIT School of Architecture and Planning’s faculty, researchers and students and supported by the Sidara Urban Seed Grant Fund at MIT’s Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. The exhibited series – which includes the Living Heritage Atlas, City Scanner, and Community Street projects – sought to explore how Beirut could potentially turn the devastation caused by the 2020 Beirut Port explosion into an opportunity for positive change and urban renewal.

More recently, Dar and Sidara supported MIT’s Ayamama Swa(m)p Exhibition at Salt Galata. The exhibition showcased research by MIT, supported by Sidara, to craft a pathway towards a more resilient, sustainable, and thriving river corridor along Istanbul’s Ayamama River. The research brought together climate scientists, urban planners, landscape designers, and architects and delved into critical intersections of climate change, urban sprawl, flooding, and decommissioned infrastructure, providing insightful reflections on the challenges of urban resilience.

With the dedication ceremony of the new Met Warehouse, Sidara’s Chairman Talal Shair confirmed Sidara’s continued support for MIT on initiatives that seek to elevate the student community and pursue groundbreaking research with the potential to impact cities and communities across the globe.