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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."
next time they should hire a civil engineer ...
I think the trick is to get both.
Witness:
http://www.fishercenter.bard.edu/about/ - another Gehry monstrosity. A performing Arts Center with no shops nor dressing rooms directly accessible to backstage.
Frank Lloyd Wright also has a college campus that's falling apart, but at least it held together for a little longer than Gehry's.
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.
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.
An architect could only win a lawsuit about the color of the walls if they got the owners to sign a contract saying they couldn't change the color of the walls. Don't sign dumb contracts is the lesson I suppose...
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?
The pictures here don't show the true horror. The television news reporters across the street refer to this building as "the technicolor hemorrhoid."
NO. Architecture is "work for hire." The architect can maintain copyright on the drawings and plans, and they might even have elements in the structure trademarked. They cannot prevent an owner from changing a building, but they can prevent the owner from saying it is a _ building when making changes.