Camille Edouard Dreyfus Chemistry Building, MIT (Building 18)

This $8 million chemistry building was dedicated on 17 April 1970 and bears the name of Camille Edouard Dreyfus, a Swiss-born chemist who, with his brother Henry, pioneered polymer research. The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation gave three million dollars in gifts and pledges to chemistry at MIT, and the National Science Foundation nearly three million dollars towards the construction. Pei, an MIT graduate, had also designed the nearby twenty-storey Green Building.

In 2000 MIT announced a three-year renovation that was to replace every system in the building (air, water, electrical and fire protection). Designed by the Boston firm Goody Clancy, the work rebuilt the interior and preserved the exterior, in phases that always left two thirds of the building in use. In 2004 R&D Magazine named the project its Renovated Laboratory of the Year.

The four-storey building is of poured concrete, with one end cantilevered. It stands in McDermott Court, east of MIT's central buildings.

Originally the laboratories were divided into small bays for two or four students, each with its own ventilation outlet and its own nitrogen and vacuum lines.

When it opened, the building was home to the chemistry department's head office and to labs where graduate students and postdocs worked on organic, bio-organic and biophysical chemistry; it served as MIT's principal site for research in synthetic organic chemistry and biochemistry.

MIT welcomes visitors to its campus; the building can be seen from outside, from McDermott Court.