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Building 20 was a temporary timber structure hastily erected during World War II on the central campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since it was always regarded as "temporary", it never received a formal name throughout its 55-year existence.
The three-floor structure originally housed the Radiation Laboratory , where fundamental advances were made in physical electronics, electromagnetic properties of matter, microwave physics, and microwave communication principles, and which has been called one of America's "two prominent shrines of the triumph of science during the war". A former Rad Lab member said, "At one time, more than 20 percent of the physicists in the United States had worked in that building".
After the Rad Lab shut down after the end of World War II, Building 20 served as a "magical incubator" for many small MIT programs, research, and student activities for a half-century before it was demolished in 1998.