You may have seen photographs of the Stata Center at MIT. It was designed by Frank Gehry and looks more like a giant art installation than a building at a university. However, having spent quite a bit of time in computer science buildings at various universities myself, I’ve noticed that many of them tend to be pretty interesting looking… perhaps it’s due to a desire to look cutting-edge or high tech. There are certainly many more examples of this (and of course, many facilities that are incredibly boring looking), but here are just a few I think would be cool places to hang out and study CS.

The Stata Center at MIT, home of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, among others – tdayal (CC)

The Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford, named for Bill Gates after he donated $6M for its construction – naotakem (CC)

The University of Nottingham in England, with the library on the left and the CS building on the right – mattbuck007 (CC)

Here’s one close to my heart… the new Klaus Advanced Computing Building at Georgia Tech, including the “binary bridge” that supposedly spells out the name of the building repeatedly in binary on the glass, though I don’t know anyone who has actually translated it – jiuguangw (CC)

And speaking of binary… the spiral staircase inside the University of Michigan Computer Science Building – nwfb (CC)

The Siebel Center for Computer Science at the University of Illinois – t_zero (CC)

Inside the Bahen Centre for Information Technology at the University of Toronto – coolnalu (CC)

Inside the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington – brymo (CC)