From an old recorded celebration of MIT Building 20:

One of the problems you see in modern research is whether you can persuade the authorities (at NIH, NSF, and so forth) to let you take a chance. Sometimes it's very difficult to defend chances. That freedom to be able to walk barefoot through the fields of the mind... that was something that was so central to Building 20 at the time... it was astonishing. There is a curious aspect about buildings where there has been dedicated work. You might almost say that it's far better than a monastery; it's more like a temple, where there's been dedicated work and where the scars and the marks on the walls and so forth all have meaning. All of the artifacts that are left aside somehow or another have meaning. There is, as it were, a passing on, not of the tradition, but of a vague memory that somehow or another is very rich.
- Jerry Lettvin, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering