Just steps from the Infinite Corridor at the heart of campus, the Lisa T. Su Building (Building 12) houses the MIT.nano facility and supports the activities of more than 2,000 MIT faculty and researchers as they design and manipulate materials, organisms, and devices at the nanoscale (one billionth of a meter).

“MIT.nano has arrived on campus at the dawn of the Nano Age,” says Vladimir Bulović, the Fariborz Maseeh Professor in Emerging Technology and founding director of MIT.nano. “In the decades ahead, its open-access facilities for nanoscience and nanoengineering will equip our community with instruments and processes that can further harness the power of nanotechnology in service to humanity’s greatest challenges.”

Constructed with soaring glass facades and powerful air-exchange systems, the building contains two levels of connected clean room spaces, an instrumentation floor, chemistry labs, prototyping labs, and the unique virtual-reality and visualization Immersion Lab. Its ultrastable basement level is anchored by a 5-million-pound slab of concrete and is dedicated to electron microscopes and other exquisitely sensitive imaging and measurement tools.

Building 12 is also designed to foster collaboration, sharing, and transparency. Its many windows allow those outside the labs and clean rooms to watch researchers at work with specialized devices. From the inside, researchers experience more sunshine and more of the world they are working to benefit. Equally important, all of the lab and instrumentation spaces in the building are designed to be shared facilities, accessible to any MIT researcher in need of the specialized devices and instruments located within.

To provide the highest level of flexibility, the building is designed to accommodate the continuous upgrading of its tools and facilities, maintaining the most advanced equipment possible to support MIT.nano's ongoing innovation at the nanoscale.

The Lisa T. Su Building has achieved LEED Platinum certification.