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MIT Sues Frank Gehry Over Buggy $300M CS Building
theodp writes "MIT has filed a negligence suit against world-renowned architect Frank Gehry, charging that flaws in his design of the $300 million Stata Center, one of the most celebrated works of architecture unveiled in years, caused leaks to spring, masonry to crack, mold to grow, and drainage to back up. The complex, which houses a Who's Who of Computing including Tim Berners-Lee and Richard Stallman, includes the William H. Gates Building."
There's a reason why most buildings don't look that way, and in fact have a very building-like look. Certain techniques *work*.
IMAO, this is as much MIT's fault as the architect's, because they approved this very experimental design.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Frank Lloyd Wright was also plagued by leaks in the roofs of his buildings.
Mies Van Der Rohe designed houses in Connecticut that are unlivable due to terrible cold drafts.
I'll take a competent architect over a famous one any day.
So they named a building after Bill Gates.
Now the building is full of holes and needs lots of patching up.
Perhaps they were tempting fate there?
If you want art you get art. If you want a higly functional building that will have minimal maintance and which can be expanded or repurposed as the furture dictates you can hardly beat a bix box building. MIT chose art.
P226
next time they should hire a civil engineer ...
Sigh... Keep It Simple Stupid. People want a something that looks cool. But when it interferes with function they blame the Architect...
Kinda fitting for a building that covers Computer Science...
There are reasons why most buildings look generally alike for a few thousand years.... Ease of building, efficiency of design. This had neither. But they went for it anyways... It is structurally sound so don't blame the atchect. You need to do more maintenance on the building because you didn't pay $300M for a building but $300M for a work of Art... Art needs to be preserved...
If the Computer Science department learned about KISS design they wouldn't be in that problem... I don't know if I would want to hire a CS Student from MIT if they don't teach the KISS Concept...
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Or 1.2 A-Rods in Standard Approximation Units.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Did it crash?
"A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it." - Churchill
to qoute:
"Not warranted to be useful for any purpose. Not intended for any critical or even any trivial functions, users assume all risks and will indemnify and hold blameless the architect and builders. User(s) also waive all right to recourse without the express written consent of the builders or architect. By reading this EULA you agree to all terms of the EULA. This EULA can be modified or revoked at anytime without notice by the builders or architect."
OK, a bit silly. Unless of course it has to do with software.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Here is the link: http://www.csail.mit.edu/biographies/PI/biolist.php
Go ahead and find Richard Stallman in that... I dare you, I double dare you!!!
TFA says MIT also sued Skanska, the GC. I'd be curious to know how much of the fault lies with Skanska and its subcontractors.
I live in Cambridge (actually about 4 blocks from the building in question). If there's one thing that's universally true in the Boston area, it's that the quality of construction is exceedingly shoddy. People don't know how to build things well here.
Maybe this is not his mistake. Maybe its USER ERROR. computer literates makes lame mistakes all the time.
He is a self-absorbed sculptor whose favorite medium is buildings. MIT has recently made the transition into having a bullshit, weak-headed administration, capable of being held rapt by shiny objects. Throw in $300M and a few hours of hand-waving, and you got yourself one hell of an eyesore (a leaky one, at that).
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Haven't run across that acronym before...k
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
"640 square meters ought to be enough for everyone"
Case Western has had the same issues with their Gehry building since it was opened to the public. But no one has even muttered the possibility of suing Gehry. MIT needs to quit whining and just deal with it.
Shine on Case Western,
A proud Case alum.
en tee
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I saw a documentary on Gehry's work and I believe it stated that he is a designer, not an engineer. He designs with pen and paper, not a CAD system. I trust an architect to design a building to stand up under its own weight and not fall down because of the wind. The engineers are responsible for implementing the design. They are the ones who have the responsibility to keep the insides dry and choose materials that can take the stresses. Whether or not the engineers were working for the building contractors or Gehry's architecture business, I don't know.
I could be viewing this through the haze of nostalgia, and I can't swear that I ever took classes in or visited labs on the top floor. But. I don't think the roof leaked.
My recollection is that the famously shabby Building 20, built hastily as a temporary building during World War II and kept in service until the Stata replaced it, was a perfectly adequately functional building that did all the various things you'd expect a building to do. (That could be a sexist remark: I don't remember what the ratio of mens' to womens' bathrooms in building 20 was; they might have been unequal).
I do not remember anyone who worked in it ever complaining about it. There must have been some, but I think it was by and large very well liked by its inhabitants.
One of the things that seemed odd to me about the Stata is that it was often felt that something about Building 20 actually seemed to encourage creativity and collaborative work, and I've always wondered why MIT, Gehry at all didn't first make a serious study Building 20 to see how and why it worked before embarking on what frankly looks to me like a half-baked display of architectural egotism.
I think Building 20's lack of visual distinctiveness may have been a plus, because it did not feel as if you were living under the shadow of someone else's creativity.
Any person with even a touch of humility would have to feel intimidated by looking out the window of one of MIT's main buildings and seeing names like Newton and Lavoisier looming over them. I've never been in the Stata, but I think it would give one the impression of being subordinated to someone else's sense of play, instead of letting one free to express one's own playfulness.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
if i did my job like those at the top, I'd get fired
the truth is that upper management is overpaid and irresponsible
But what caliber and action?
I hope that people who work in the Stata Center will reply to this thread. I have many friends there, but have not, myself spent more than an occasional afternoon in the complex.
That said, there are some things that buildings, especially public buildings, should do. They should make it easy to find things, especially central, shared resources like elevators, lobbies, cafeterias, and, especially, exits. The Stata Center fails on all counts. It is difficult-to-impossible to navigate to the uninitiated and, from what people who work there tell me, it is difficult for them as well.
The interior spaces are very architecturally interesting. But have so many bugs it is unbelievable. There is one meeting room where the walls are made with perforated plywood; this is a cool idea, but, regrettably, due to the mechanisms that human vision uses to fuse the images between the two eyes, the sea of holes makes people feel queasy in that room. The workspaces are part of a grand open-office design. The previous building where LCS/AI was housed was the antithesis of open design -- a series of small offices -- and it worked very well. With the new building, researchers and students spend more of their time at home, rather than in the building, because the lack of acoustic privacy in the open design makes it extremely difficult to get any research done. In another area, there are ledges high up in one two-story space that are visible only from the story above -- kind of interesting, but these ledges will never, ever be cleaned and are starting to accumulate a goodly layer of dust. This wouldn't be so bad, except that people entering that space from the elevator lobby are immediately faced with this grime.
From what people intimately involved with the planning have told me, Geary approached the design of this building with astonishing hubris and disregard for any of the actual needs of the occupants. Interactions with him were often tense and acrimonious. Geary's willing ignorance of the real use of the building, rather than his imagined fantasy, shows. It's a cool looking structure that works very, very poorly as a research laboratory. Although few people who work there are willing to state it out loud, the rumblings are being felt that the decline of computer science research at MIT has in no small part been due to this negative influence of the building on daily worklife.
A good building will not only be easy to use, but will inspire its occupants. The old building at 545 Tech Square wasn't showy at all, but had some fantastic vistas, and a reasonably efficient use of space. (I had a series of offices in that building over the span of 14 years.) It was perhaps no accident that the basis for much of Computer Science (time-sharing operating systems, language research, the internet, high-performance compilers, distributed computation, microarchitecture, multi-processor design, speech recognition, theory, and a host of other areas) was performed there. I hope that this illustrious history will be continued in the Stata center, but am beginning to wonder if it will.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Gehry won't be receiving much sympathy from the residents of Minneapolis, who are forced to live with the Weisman Museum. The 'tin man' as it's known is sore-thumb public eyesore #1 in the U of M campus area.
Eyesore - figuratively and literally. Not only is this one of the ugliest, most mis-placed pieces of architecture in the metro, its reflective stainless steel skin blinds drivers crossing the Washington Avenue bridge in the late afternoon, when the sun is behind them and they're headed eastbound. Nice planning, folks.
Oh, and about the skin.. it's badly wrinkled, due to "unforeseen" issues with thermal expansion and contraction. Basically, the building looks like a crushed aluminum take-out box, about to litter itself into the Mississippi river.
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Wow! You know we're geeks when we refer to a building as "buggy"! Is that the same as waiting until after a classroom session to have an "off-line" discussion?
(Lighten up. It's a joke.)
It sits on the bank of the Mississippi and we always wanted to build a steam cannon or something quiet to lob ball bearings at it from the far shore against its stainless steel exterior. Never quite got around to it...should have made the time.
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
From the article: "Snow and ice cascaded dangerously from window boxes and other projecting roof areas, blocking emergency exits and damaging other parts of the building, according to the suit."
This exact same problem is encountered every year at Gehry's Peter B Louis Building on the CWRU campus. We call the building the metal kleenex box, because it looks like a wavy brick building with a lot of useless big metal waves coming out in every direction from the top. The problem is that in the winter, these metal waves get covered in snow, which inevitably slides off onto the people below (Gehry strategically placed the largest such avalanche directly above one of the two main sidewalks on that corner).
I work for a fortune 500 luxury goods company that recently had Gehry design *jewelry*, of all things. Let's just say that the line is on the verge of being cancelled due to poor sales - many of the items are already discontinued. Sure, the stuff is interesting to look at, but much of it is impractical to wear. I'm not at all surprised that the guy's designed a building that's practically falling apart.
Here's a good photo of the death trap in question.
I know of quite a few comp.sci folk. "who's who" means people of great importance. Just because I know of RMS doesn't mean he's relevant, or that his attention whoring activities are newsworthy events.
All thankful for the FSF movement, but nowadays it's more irrelevant than ever.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Check this guy out: http://www.csail.mit.edu/biographies/PI/bioprint.php?PeopleID=479
He's like a mix between Steve Ballmer and Phil Harrison.
Disclaimer : IANAA, but I am an architectural designer / draftsman.
Gehry is a diva.
Despite the builder's recommendation to change the design of the ampitheatre to include drainage and jointing (to prevent cracks) he refused to compromise his "vision" and told them to go ahead with his design.
Gehry has been around awhile, he should know better.
If the guys in the field bring up an issue (unrelated to aesthetics) it needs to be addressed somehow, and not by saying 'Look, who's the architect here? Do it my way.'
Too many architects draw details that don't work in the real world. This makes it the contractors job to correct those details in the field, if the architect allows it. I'm sure that Gehry, or one of his partners had oversight responsibility on the project, and with his ego, probably forbid any field modification of the details.
Anonymous because I'm lazy
I agree that the school should realized what they were getting into when they agreed to this design. But then it's also the responsibility of the architect to make the client aware of potential problems and do what they can in the design to avoid these problems. I suppose architect's lawyers should have put a clause in their contract absolving them from responsibility for any problems arising from this unconventional design.
However, the question is whether the problems arose from the design itself or from shoddy construction. I'd like to see construction companies being held more responsible for the messes they create. Right near work a road in the process of being repaved is already being torn up and those holes sloppily covered up. It's insane the kind of crap these companies get away with, especially when dealing with the government.
Didn't Ellsworth Toohey sue Howard Roark? For designing a temple that did not look like a temple or what?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Greatest programmer of all time?
Let's see, he doesn't maintain GCC or most GNU projects anymore. And hasn't for a long time.
We don't run HURD last time I checked.
He hasn't invented any new algorithms or techniques that I know of (please correct me if I'm wrong).
Seems to me we owe a lot of the OSS scene to people OTHER THAN RMS.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Millennium Park http://www.millenniumpark.org/
Over budget by $350 million and was completed four years behind schedule.
Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
You're still a nobody even if GCC is principally developed by RedHat. Maybe you should create a few more libraries with your name in it, and in 40-50 years someone might remember you.
"Gehry is my favorite sculptor" is a phrase I love to use with my teachers. Its not that eccentric designs aren't fun and should be abolished. Its that when you use a design like this that, if this building is like the Disney concert hall at all, doesn't actually USE any of the unique curves and forms as anything more than a facade, its pointless. The buildings of Gehry I've seen are basically boxes with really really neat facades. Ugly and sometimes blinding facades; but not "accomplished" facades.
I'm seeing a lot of posts like "hire civil engineers to make your building" or "I want a building that works, not some pretty thing". Please note first of all that you'd probably want a structural engineer. And probably wind up with a box similiar to a hospital (90% of which is designed by structural engineers). You'd probably also wind up with a box with problems like doors opening over toilets and drawers in bathrooms, shelves for various applications in labs and kitchens being spaced in a way as to not be as convenient as you'd first like them, a more expensive house as HVAC is either not minimized or not as efficiently used or as the lighting uses no outside sources...I'm not saying structural engineers break any laws; they just usually design quickly and to the code, ignoring the needs of the inhabitants which takes a trained eye and education as a designer to properly see these minute details.
Yes, architects design. Sometimes their designs fail. But they know when they take up the pencil (or, most likely, CAD) that they are most likely to get sued or, worst of all for a designer, people will die AND they'll get sued, if they don't do their job properly.
Finally, I agree that sculpture buildings, while pretty, are best left to case studies and studio designs in Grad schools. There's a reason minimalism, modernism and post-modernism is so popular with modern architects. But this doesn't mean that your building would be "better" if it was just designed by a structural engineer. And this doesn't mean all architect's design like Gehry, who is considered a bit of a joke in the architecture world to be honest (at least among my professors).
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
http://web.mit.edu/gsc/www/programs/ring/bezel.shtml
My old office window looked out on the Stata Center and I frequently eat lunch there. I have always considered it a monstrous waste of money. A good building should blend form and function. The Stata Center was cleary designed with a particular form in mind, and the engineers were forced to make function follow. A nice building with few problems and more efficient use of space could have been built for much less money (like the new Brain and Cognitive Science building across the street). The money saved could have been put to better use as financial aid for students. Or for the upkeep of MIT's other building. MIT tends to sink ridiculous amounts of money into new construction projects, but seems unwilling to spend the money to properly care for the older buildings already constructed.
As our ability to mold our creations to our whims while maintaining certain functions increases there are bound to be fuck ups along the way.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
Wow, you really hurt my feelings, oy, the pain.
Maybe you losers can realize that the world isn't all or nothing. RMS is probably a good comp.sci fellow but he's not a fucking god. And small though my "following" may be, I don't define myself by it, heck I'm barely involved in it anymore. I'm quite content being an even LESSER KNOWN student pianist than "coding legend."
All of the tools you take for granted today are not the product of RMS'es hard work. They just aren't. What? You think without RMS that no C compiler would have been written for the OSS community? His achievement was spearheading the FSF movement when it was still a radical idea. And for that I say kudos. But this is 2007, not 1982. Get with the times.
Shannon might have invented information theory, but I wouldn't give him credit for the AES design [for example], nor the MPEG series of codecs.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
"one of the most celebrated works of architecture unveiled in years, caused leaks to spring, masonry to crack, mold to grow, and drainage to back up..... The complex.....includes the William H. Gates Building."
Sort of reads like a commentary on a popular PC operating system.
Gehry should do an upgrade of the William H. Gates building that will look 90% different, be strangely larger for no reason, have no flow to it, cost you every time you walk in the door even if you work there, the lights take 6 minutes to turn on in the morning and even then won't go on 30% of the time, and you have to hit 3 buttons to un-jam the elevator every 45 minutes.
Hey - Gehry is the Gates of Architecture.
A Ph.D designs it, a certified mechanic works out the production proess, and an ex-con that just had a 24-pack for lunch builds it.
the esteemed graduates of MITs prestigious Architecture and Civil Engineering programs.
A promising future lies ahead of you!
I go to a university in Cleveland. Needless to say, we get a good amount of snow in wintertime, being on a lake as we are. Well, our business (oh, I'm sorry, management) school has a Gehry building (pictures here, look at the floor plans to get an idea of how confusing the building is) uglying up our campus, too. Problem is, the roof is so curved and twisted that once snow starts to fall, it collects on the roof until huge chunks of snow and ice fall around 15 feet off it all at once, onto a heavily-traveled sidewalk. The problem was so bad that the university used to just close that sidewalk for the winter once the first flake hit the ground.
Now, starting for this winter, they've installed concrete planters along the building, probably (but not admittedly) to give the snow a place to land that isn't on students' heads, while still keeping the sidewalk open. Rumor is that my school wanted Gehry to pony up money to help pay for the planters, but he refused. I mean, seriously, would a competent architect fail to realize that snow falls in Cleveland? Doubtful, but Gehry did.
Those who anthropomorphize science and/or nature already believe in an intelligent designer.
To do a project this big, you need an architect with a vision, an engineer who can see reality, a builder who can build it right, and a U.N. peacemaker to keep them from killing each other.
Oh, and you need a customer with the balls to say "if you can't work together and give me a building that not only looks good but lasts a long time, you are all fired."
On a related note, the building should have a functional warranty for 10-20 years with the payments for all of these guys spread over an equal period of time. Warranty claims will be deducted against these guys' remaining paychecks.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
... who read the title and thought, "MIT spent $300,000,000 on a building to play Counterstrike!?!?!?!?!"
At the very least, a civil engineer should've been hired to do a cursory check on things that the architecture might not have considered, such as gravity. Architects are like web designers, i.e., they design pretty interfaces rather than build infrastructures. They're artists, not engineers. I'm not too familiar with how these buildings are done, but don't they have a team of engineers involved to make sure things like this don't happen?
I see what you mean. . .
What?
Gehry won't be receiving much sympathy from the residents of Minneapolis, who are forced to live with the Weisman Museum.
Nor from the residents of Brooklyn, New York, who will soon be forced to live with his Barclays Center at Atlantic Yards; a twisty clump of glass skyscrapers jutting out in the middle of a thousand century-old brownstones.
I like Gehry's interior design work -- his cafeteria design for Condé Nast is great, even if the floors did have to be replaced after only a couple of years due to intended warping -- but he seems entirely incapable of creating a building exterior that's compatible with its surroundings in any way. He's all sore thumbs.
the birthplace of radar, and beloved of researchers because it was pretty much a huge project box that could be altered (internally) at will to suit their needs? Building twenty was basically a big old shed, and a place like MIT needs buildings like that, unglamorous shells that keep the rain off of people while they let their creativity run riot.
That said I think the Stata center is cool in many ways; it's probably the right kind of idea for housing computer geeks who aren't interested in knocking down walls and hauling in a huge surplus milling machine weighing a couple of thousand pounds.
But they sure lost something when they knocked down building 20, rather than another, less distinguished building that was little more than a monument to a forgotten architect's ego. Of course, at this rate it doesn't look like Mr. Gehry is going to be forgotten, at least by the Institute's lawyers.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
IBM's great adventure in architecture for programmers was IBM Santa Teresa, opened in 1977. They really tried to build a building optimized for programming work. The first priority was "a private, personal work area that permits intense concentration, screens distractions, and discourages interruptions, with connections for a computer terminal and adequate space to lay out and store large quantities of paper goods".
Sounds like MIT's architect blew it there.
I heard from the grapevine that the lawsuit is just a necessary step in making a claim on the insurance policy that was taken out just for this type of 'repair'. Not sure if that is true.
As for the building. The first floor is great, it is huge and provides plenty of space for eating lunch, having a chat, or just sitting (which is in short supply elsewhere on campus). There are some funny things about the construction that I've noticed, for instance, there is a lot of bare concrete (which would be covered in a 'normal' building) so the construction crews have written specs, measurements, etc on them and in a few places there are soda cans and chip bags exposed in the concrete.
take it or leave it? i'd leave it and opt for a more functional building at a fraction of the cost (like the brain and cog. science building across the street)
Architect Dude: Here is the model for your building of the future! It has all of these cool features, and looks pretty damn schnazzy to boot
Bean Counter Dude: How much does it cost?
Architect Dude: This baby will cost you about $350 million to build
Bean Counter Dude: Whoa nellie, that's way too freakin much! Let's see, we don't need this here, or that there
Architect Dude: But those are needed for good drainage. Without them, you'll get mold
Bean Counter: That fine - we'll buy dehumidifiers.. either way, I'll be long gone to my next corporate scam by the time that happens
Architect Dude: m'kay
Bean Counter: Let's see, we also don't need this here, or that there
Architect Dude: But those support structures aren't just visual. They keep the Left Wing from sagging under its own weight
Bean Counter: Well, we'll just put less furniture in there. How long would it take to be a problem?
Architect Dude: I dunno, 2 years, maybe 3?
Bean Counter: Cool, I'll have my bonus before then and will be retired, living in Costa Rica. Perfect. Take it out!
and so on...
Too often, brilliant technological works are crippled by bean counters with too much throw, to save a small percentage of cost..
He caused mold to grow?
The Admin and the Engineer
The Borg just aren't building like they used to. Maybe they should replace the colorful paint with the standard black sealant layer.
The pictures here don't show the true horror. The television news reporters across the street refer to this building as "the technicolor hemorrhoid."
As an occupant of the building, I have to say that it's not really buggy at all. There are very few bugs, in fact. The bigger problem is with the fucking mice. The building is so full of holes that mice (and pigeons, sometimes!) wander in.
Is it really true that the new Seattle public library is sinking? When I was there it was like the Taj Majal, except for the thousands of Windows PC's and a network which would routinely crash.
The Asahi beer hall in Asakusa, Tokyo. Designed by Philippe Starck, it's meant to be a cloud.
"Hi kids!, Today's Japanese phrase is 'Kin no unchi', which means 'The golden poop'." Since this is how the Japanese refer to the building, you can tell they see it the same way.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Summa Cum Laude
I really didn't want to know what RMS sounds like when hes fapping.
So you need three imaginary people and an engineer?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The William Gates building...
I think I know who is really to blame for the cracked leaky building of death
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Yeah, well said! You rock! I'm sure nobody's thought of that! ... ....
Just kidding, who do you think you are? Do you think architects do the welding and cement mixing themselves? Do you realize that buildings have been built for, oh, I don't know, thousands of years, and that maybe, just maybe, people thought of this before you?
The reason why MIT is suing the *architect* is, I believe, because he's responsible for choosing and hiring those engineering firms which were derelict in their duty, and failed to supervise them. Those firms are most likely not contracted directly by MIT, therefore have no direct contractual obligation to them. The architect will, in turn, sue the contractors, or his insurers will.
I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a civil engineer, I'm just a guy one of whose friends had to sue a real estate developer for the same kind of shit, and who used to have a civil engineer as a neighbor.
...Civil Engineers design targets.
Seriously, though, I've been aerospace, mechanical (widgets), and structural (architectural)...keeping buildings up is very simple, really. Keeping them watertight (the architect's job, btw) is a real pain in the ass.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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Or stevenson ? james watt ? or many other prominent names who did great additions to human civilization ? come again ?
being a throwback hippie would be a spectacular record in 'academic' humanism and rational thought compared to the actual political/life views of many such prominent historical names.
Read radical news here
I bet I'm not the only person here who misses Building 20. (For those who don't know, it was the last of the buildings thrown together during WWII for the Rad Lab. Even at the end, parts of it (like my grad student office) didn't have light switches. Who needs light switches if there's a break panel down the hall? But great things were done there. Among other things, it housed Linguistics and Philosophy, the Model Railway Club, the Piano Lab, ROTC, and Jerry Letvin.)
rant complete. :P
---------
No matter how thin you slice it, its still baloney.
They are beautiful to look at but they
Leak
Rattle
Have doorways that are too low (FLW was short & made his doors an evil joke on the world)
Are Hard to heat and cool.
sounds extremely similar to the bio-x building at stanford:
world renouned architect
awards for "building of the year"
amazing new design, new system for workspaces
complete and total nightmare to maintain
a full time staff of 4 people just to fix problems, leaks, repairs
built over budget, original designs never finished
significant noise problems
tremendous ongoing costs to keep it operational
But you ask anyone above the institutional power-face water line in the system and they all say the same thing: "It's amazing, so great, best thing ever" and you talk to people who work in the building, the grad students, same thing "I hate it here - noisy, expensive, poorly deisgned to get anything done"
Fallingwater has unfortunately turned out to be the correct name for that building, but it's such a stunning place that it was worth building anyway, as long as the owners knew to think of it as a temporary art project rather than a centuries-of-use edifice. On the other hand, even a lot of his prairie-style stuff fails really badly in a few years if you don't do good maintenance on it, making sure all the windows and flashings stay watertight.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It was built a bit crooked.
I can't concentrate. Must be the bad acoustics in my cubicle area. My nearby window is very chilly in the wintertime, it has very bad insulation. In big rainstorms, the ceiling leaks onto the nearby whiteboard. It's been repaired a few times, but new leaks appear. The server room often overheats, bringing down my connection to the internet. I have a long walk to the bathroom, there just aren't enough toilets in this place. And they clog at least twice a month! And the walk to the cafeteria takes 8 turns and 2 flights of stairs. Visitors have a hard time finding it! Damn, I can't work in this environment! My work is suffering. Damn all these problems. This building sucks.
Where's the "Feng Shui"?
There must be some good tips in this Feng Shui tips page for all those working within this horrible, dismal, oppressive, new building at MIT. http://iccsg.wordpress.com/2006/08/12/feng-sui-tips-for-you/
this building will produce 10 different Eiffel tower like lopsided buildings coincidentally leaning toward at different angle that no lopsided part overlays the other. good investment for future tourism? sorry. having look at that pic of building inspired me.
Perhaps MIT should build another building, this time with proper intrastructure planning and design. And then house current Strata research in the new building.
MIT certainly has the cash, and they could certainly find some others to occupy what would then be the "old Strata." Maybe the MIT museum could move and expand into old Strata...
IAALBNYL (I Am A Lawyer But Not Your Lawyer).
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
most of the work that was done on pulling emacs together was done by rms.
i'm pretty sure i'd die without emacs.
Siebel Center is better.
HAHA!
C'mon, mod it up.
So wait, judging from the comments here, Frank Gehry is the Rob Liefeld of architecture?
I used to work for NetQoS. I no longer do, but want to keep the excellent karma attached to this account.
The whole lot, nothing but a bunch of rich-assed idiotic bastards who've spent their whole lives on daddy's dime. Worse than Harvard, because Harvard doesn't pretend to be obsessed with merit.
Look for god's sake you people can just spend your lives avoiding buildings like these pretty easily I should have thought, there certainly aren't many of them around.
The world is full of ordinary buildings. Just as the world is full of ordinary paintings, ordinary books, ordinary music. Ordinary everything. It is important for iconoclasts such as Gehry to produce their work, just as it is important for the likes of Cy Twombly, Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs etc to produce theirs. I won't name any musicians since it always seems to start an argument when I do :)
So, in short, you guys are bunch of dull, unimaginative.... well it would be trollish to continue in that vein, so I shan't. But you get the idea.
Personally, when I look at things like that I think to myself "well if we can spend our efforts as a species producing astonishing looking things like that perhaps we're not so fucked after all"
Flaws aside, I really enjoy going there, and for no other reason than its a fun building. If you cant have fun with a building at MIT than where else? If a cube farm at Lockheed is your idea if Utopia, then hey, the Stata Center isnt your kind of place. Then again if you think New York City streets are great because they're so practical and symmetrical, then Boston streets will have you gnawing on your own nose after a few hours. Maybe the Stata Center reflects the city its in just fine.
And as for MIT 'deciding' on it, I'm pretty sure Ray Stata had something to say about what kind of building they built with his money in his name. Ray usually has some pretty strong sentiments about stuff. And seeing as one of his wafer fabs is half a block from there Im guessing he was pretty active in the planning stages.
It's a nice day, so I went and took a picture regardless. Here it is.
Make a difference: move to a swing state.
Frank Gehry is so over. MIT should have hired Zaha Hadid:
Hadid's Performing Arts Center, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Hadid's Herault Culture Sport Building, Montpellier, France
Rising star Hadid (a Rem Koolhaas protege) is turning science fiction dreams into real buildings. Tell me you wouldn't want to see one of her biomorphic, otherworldly sci-fi spaceships land on the boring campus of MIT. Instead they spent $300 million on some cartoon prisons that leak.
Takeaway point: Stop letting computer scientists choose architects.
An aerospace professor told me how aerospace engineers had to do the jobs of all sorts of other engineers. Electrical, computer, chemical, mechanical, and architectural. Why? Because all of those disciplines were involved in building aircraft. One student asked why he didn't include civil engineers.
"Oh, because civil engineers don't have anything to do with building aircraft. Civil engineers build targets."
MIT is housing RMS in the WG building??? Has the planetary alignment gone completely out of whack??
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
The works or Oscar Niemeyer in Brazil have similar issues. They are beautiful to look at from a distance, but they are a bitch to use.
Can I get a haha tag people? This is SO funny to me and I just think we should be consistent when laughing at the misfortune of others. Wouldn't want that liberal bias to show...
That's why his company is called micro-soft. Which 5¼-incher did you think that he was playing with when he came up with that name?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I used to be a contractor, and I can attest that the overall level of building quality in Boston is very high. You'd be right to say that NEW construction tends to be shoddy, but this is true all over. A lot of the old construction we've got lying around here is well-to-overbuilt. Shoddy work doesn't tend to stay up.
The newer the building, though, the worse it generally tends to be. Postwar structures are always a crapshoot. A lot of the newer styles of homes and office buildings weren't really designed to last, and either have design flaws or were built with non-"archival" materials. Even our newer buildings follow fairly strict building code compared with many parts of the country, however.
The crappiest buildings in the Boston area tend to be new McMansions built out in the suburbs- even if an architect approved the plan, they tend to be built as cheaply as possible, with Home Depot parts. Cambridgeport does have some seriously creaky old worker housing, it's true, but there are plenty of well built structures there, too. Think about how many of the old triple deckers are still around.
Ok, he's already at +5, so since he can't get modded any higher, I'll put a comment below his to draw more attention to it.
The entire parent post is dead on! The architectural firm would've had engineers involved throughout. The contractor that built it even objected to some of the design features they saw leading to the problems MIT is experiencing now, but was overruled by the designers. Odd building designs are not impossible to make work...heck even Frank Lloyd Wright's eyesores hold together for the most part.
And while I'm at it...holy crap that thing is ugly! Maybe Gehry et al figured anybody gullible enough to buy a building that takes all of the worst design cues from the 1960's and combines that with the appearance of being in the act of falling down would be an easy target to screw over.
I'm now a one-man architectural services firm. Three imaginary people? Hah, I have twelve. Two of them just have to stand there and look pretty all day. Union rules, don't you know.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I look at them and think "what I wouldn't give for some stone columns."
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
More like GNU/Stata center. Richard Stallman sucks.
"..includes the William H. Gates Building..."
I think we found the source of the bugs. Nothing to see here.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
I'll say. Falling Water started falling apart before it was even finished.
As the subject says, the U of Iowa has had it's share of problems too. I don't know a lot about each one, but clearly architects, builders, and the U did not communicate properly.
The College of Pharmacy, looks OK but has this big lump on the end with an elevator in it. I have heard that the foundation was laid with accomodations for an elevator on one end, then the whole building was built backwards on top of that. So, one end has an area where an elevator would go, but can't, and the other has this bulge added on the to accomodate an elevator. (This is a farly conventional building, although it's large; so it's possible the architect(s) would not have been supervising building, making it a contractor & University problem...)
The Bowen Science Building has these huge concrete tubes inside it. The building was designed without ventilation in the entire building! From what I have heard, essentially the official response was that the U signed off on the design, and really should have made sure it had ventilation first (!!). So, these slabby concrete tubes were thrown in after the fact to allow for airflow. I'm also surprised this building was built for fire-code type reasons; it's not that old a building, but large portions of the building have a single, one-person wide walkway as their sole exits.. although, the building is concrete so I guess it wouldn't burn so easily 8-).
The laser center (which I think is now called the "center for excellence" or some such crap.) I don't know how it is structurally, but the roof is copper. The intention was apparently for it to be a nice shiny copper color, then gradually get a nice greenish patina to it. The reality, the copper runs off in the rain, causes gross green streaks to run down all along the building, and indeed to color the surrounding concrete a sort of moldy green. The grass and landscaping has looked a bit less healthy of late as well.