Rafael Reif Is (Finally) in the House

Caption: Reif, now a campus resident, joins a student snowball fight.

When L. Rafael Reif became MIT president last year, he did not immediately move into Gray House, the Institute president's home since 1917. Instead, the Newton resident commuted to work as essential repairs—addressing aging wiring and leaky windows—were completed. On Feb. 5 The Tech announced the big move, "Reif Is in the House:"

He didn’t wait long to take advantage of the new proximity—Reif left for the men’s and women’s basketball games in Rockwell Cage on Saturday after just a few hours in his new home. “I asked my wife, ‘Is it okay if I just go to the game?’” he said. “I like the idea that I can just come and walk and watch. This is my way of celebrating I’m in Gray House.”

After two feet of snow fell on campus Feb. 9, President Reif was quickly out the door to engage in a snow ball fight with students. A snowstorm slide show documents the fun.

Curious about Gray House? The MIT Archives and Special Collections provided these notes:

The Italianate style house was designed by William Wells Bosworth Class of 1889, the architect of the 1916 campus. The house was completed in 1917 and was the last part of Bosworth’s plan to be constructed.

The 1988 book MIT Art and Architecture describes it this way: “The President’s House, an austere version of a Roman Villa, employs a graceful Pomeiian Corinthian order and was appreciated at the time as expressing a ‘delightful balance of sobriety and lightness of touch held in fine reserve.’”

Stone & Webster, the company that constructed the new campus, built the house as a gift to MIT. Company founders Charles A. Stone and Edwin S. Webster, both members of the MIT Class of 1888, committed $150,000 to the project.

The garden was designed in 1917 by Mabel Keyes Babcock Class of 1908, landscape architect and teacher. Babcock’s commission for the President’s Garden was expanded to the entire campus including Killian Court.

President Richard Maclaurin and his wife Alice were involved in the design, according to the 1937 book, Richard Cockburn Maclaurin:

“They were told to plan the house as exactly to their taste as though they were to own it themselves, and they took the delightful responsibility very seriously.” The house “perfectly adapted to large-scale entertaining, it yet had no great reception room set aside for that purpose. The President’s family lives in it all, without any sense of echoing space; the guests, whether hundreds at a time or only a handful, are conscious of being in a home. For this is what the Maclaurins desired.

In 2002, the President's House was renamed Gray House in honor of Paul and Priscilla Gray, former president and first lady of MIT.