The Great Dome, which sits atop Building 10, is modeled on McKim, Mead, and White's Low Memorial Library at Columbia University, which is in turn an imitation of the Pantheon in Rome.

The building was built in 1916 and was designed in the Neoclassical style by William Welles Bosworth. The collection of buildings that surround the Great Dome were named in honor of MIT president Richard C. Maclaurin, who was instrumental in organizing MIT's move from Boston to "The New Technology" campus in Cambridge. The facade of Building 10 is dominated by a colonnade of ten monumental columns of the classic Ionic order. The Brass Rat, MIT's class ring, features the Building 10 facade on the shank of each ring, including a portrayal of the Great Dome.

The Dome was originally planned to be a cavernous assembly hall, but budget limitations threatened to prevent construction of the Dome altogether. A smaller library – now the Barker Engineering Library – and lecture hall (10–250) instead filled the space. Architectural historian Mark Jarzombek later described the library space as a "capacious oculus [admitting] light into its center, and its perimeter surrounded by a row of Corinthian columns. Four curved topped aedicules [add] a counter-punctual element. More baroque in flavor that what one normally might have expected from Bosworth, the building seems in fact to be an inside-out quotation from Christopher Wren's St. Paul's Cathedral." Bosworth noted that the columns of the Pantheon's porch are not placed along a straight line, but bow out a bit toward the central axis. This is a classical optical illusion also used in the Parthenon of Athens to make the line of columns appear straight. Bosworth replicated this technique at MIT; to observe it, one has to lie down and sight along the front of the steps. Based on its psychological and numerical centrality to the main campus of the Institute, members of the MIT community sometimes humorously refer to the Great Dome as "The Center of the Universe".