Last Rites for a 'Plywood Palace' That Was a Rock of Science

There was a wake here on Friday, and more than 200 mourners gathered to mark the passing and celebrate, not a person, but an unusual building. The mourners were mostly scientists who had worked in the building, ''the plywood palace,'' as it has been called for 50 years, a building that was midwife to a great array of discoveries in fields as varied as radar and frog vision.

The ramshackle structure, which stands amid a sea of glass and concrete buildings on Vassar Street at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was built quickly during World War II and was only intended to last ''to the end of the war plus six months.'' It has always been known simply as ''Building 20.''

Its nondescript name and appearance give no clue to its importance to science. In America, one physicist explained, there are two prominent shrines of the triumph of science during the war: One is the desert installation at Los Alamos, N.M., where the atomic bomb was born; the other is the plywood building where radar was invented. (''Radar won the war, and the atom bomb ended it,'' as one Building 20 old-timer put it). Los Alamos remains, but by this time next year, Building 20 will be gone.

The scientists traveled from around the country to attend the wake, and they all insisted that this building was not just about the war and radar, but was a true altar of creativity.

Among the formal achievements of those who worked in Building 20 were the creation of radar, the construction of the world's first atomic clock and the start of the modern school of linguistics under the impetus of Noam Chomsky. One of the earliest atomic particle accelerators was built there, Amar Bose reinvented the speaker there, and Harold Edgerton, the master of stop-action photography, set up his strobes and cameras in this space to photograph a bullet shot through an apple.

It was not just an accident of history; the building itself, they said, had something to do with discovery. It had plywood walls and ceilings, so scientists could easily punch through their boundaries, without permission. And they did. Down the halls of the building, just overhead, ran exposed pipes and wires. No one said they could not tap into these to borrow water, electricity and telephone connections, so they did.

The building's windows never fit, and would sometimes fall out in stiff winds. The place was hot in the summer, cold in winter and drafty all the time. Soot blew in from the city, and rain poured in through the roof leaks. And there was always the noise, the strange, unfiltered sounds of everyone else's work.

The building was supersecret and secure for military reasons, of course, with a barbed-wire fence around it. But then, too, there was the student in a nearby dorm who wandered in one night through the open back door, and came back day after day to use the great equipment he found there.

Prof. Emeritus Jerome A. Lettvin, who joined the circus in Building 20 in 1954, told a typical story.

''I was a shrink,'' Dr. Lettvin said, ''but I wanted to study the electrical properties of neurons, so I ended up in the department of electrical engineering.''

Along with two other luminaries of neurophysiology of the time, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, also in Building 20, Dr. Lettvin wrote one of the more famous papers among those at the root of the new cognitive sciences, one called ''What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain.''

That paper marked a watershed in how how scientists thought about the organization of the nervous system. At least in the frog, the nervous system was not a lot of wires topped by a great processor, as expected. Rather, some ''thinking'' occurred at the level of the nerves in the retina long before reaching the brain.

One of the legendary figures who haunted the halls of Building 20 was Manuel Cerillo, a mathematician. ''He was, to my mind, one of the greatest estheticians since Pythagoras,'' Dr. Lettvin said. ''Among other things, he proved you could get stereo sound from monaural records. I wouldn't have believed it, but I heard it myself.''

''We were working late one night, at 2 A.M.,'' Dr. Lettvin said. He and his colleagues were trying to measure the electronic ''noise'' in nerve contacts. The actual noise of the building made such measurements impossible in the daytime.

''So it was late at night,'' Dr. Lettvin said. ''Suddenly, there came a huge burst of sound from below us. Enough to rattle the windows. It was ''Pictures at an Exhibition'' by Mussorgsky. It stopped, and then it played again at maximum volume. Three times that night. It was weird, but we went back to work.

''The next night it was repeated, and the next. So finally Brad Howland, Walter Pitts and I were overcome by curiosity, and we went downstairs and knocked on the door. It opened and there was this figure Manuel Cerillo, who looked like an Aztec, hollering, 'What do you want?'

''He was sitting in the center of a circle of 30 amplifiers and 30 speakers, and the heat was very intense -- those were the days of tube amplifiers that produced great heat. Manuel explained to us that he had made a discovery, and he sat Walter Pitts in the middle of the circle of speakers, turned them on and showed him.''

The discovery was that each musical instrument has a signature ''start-up'' sound before its full notes begin; for example, the scratch of resin against a violin string as a note starts, or a rattle in a reed starting up in an oboe or bassoon ''And it is that start-up sound that gives us the sense of the instrument actually being in the room with you, and gives us the signal of which direction the instrument is in,'' Dr. Lettvin said.

Mr. Cerillo had placed noise generators with the proper ''start-up'' scratchiness for each different instrument around the circle. ''So when the bassoons started up,'' Professor Lettvin recalled, ''you would say, 'Hey, that came from over there and it sounded so real.' The violins came from behind you, and so on -- it was a delicious sensation. You were in the middle of an orchestra.''

Dr. Lettvin, now 78 (''I'm a relic,'' he said, ''most of the people from the earliest years are dead,'' ), said Building 20 was a happy accident. It was an agora, not a university.

''When we had parties, there were no class distinctions,'' he said. ''The janitors and technicians were there getting drunk with the rest of us.''

The building was created out of wartime necessity, but it soon mushroomed from a shelter for a handful of specialists to a home for almost 4,000 researchers in 20 disciplines. At one time, more than 20 percent of the physicists in the United States (including nine Nobel Prize winners) had worked in that building, said Dr. Theodore Saad, an original member of the Radiation Laboratory at M.I.T.

It all started in 1940, before the United States was at war, Dr. Saad recalled. Vannevar Bush, a former M.I.T. provost who was then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's science adviser, gave the President a one-page list of research that would be vital for the war. Roosevelt looked it over briefly and signed it -- the authorization for the creation of the National Defense Research Council.

One of the five committees created under the council was the committee on microwave radiation. Theory already suggested that powerful waves of radiation, like those of radio transmitters but putting out far more compact and higher frequency waves, might be bounced off objects and the echoes ''read'' as blips on a screen.

The United States possessed no signal generator that could produce such powerful, small waves at the time; even if there were one, no instruments were built to pick up and read the echoes.

The British, under siege already, shipped over their ''magnetron,'' a device that could produce just the needed waves. The first radar image produced from the British machine and the ensuing American research, was obtained from the roof of an M.I.T. building, of the spire of the Christian Science temple across the Charles River. They conveyed the good news to their colleagues across the Atlantic by inserting a single cryptic sentence into a commercial short-wave broadcast: ''We have seen Mary Baker Eddy with one eye.'' At the memorial, Dr. Lettvin said the structure was not just a building. Memories are distributed throughout its physical structure, as marks on the walls, alterations of the space, the way people shaped their environment inside it.

It has captured spirits, Dr. Lettvin said, and is more like a temple than a pile of building materials.

The temporary plywood structure, which will be demolished this summer, is being replaced with a multimillion dollar building, to be designed by Frank Gehry, an architect of the ultramodern school.

Building 20, said Morris Halle, a linguist who spent decades inside the wooden structure, was cheap. It was not designed at all, just built. And that was what gave those who worked in the building to change their space as they saw fit. But in the new building, people will not even be able to open the windows.

''Can you believe it?'' Dr. Lettvin said. ''Too expensive now to make windows that open.''