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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.
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
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.
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
Quoting my sister (a civil engineer, so there's obvious bias...):
"a civil engineer is someone who has to take plans produced by an architect's drug-addled mind and correct it until the building will be able to stand without collapsing". Or "an architect lures customers with pretty-looking pictures, then a civil engineer has to make it actually work".
The article strongly suggests that she may be right...
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
"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.
Bingo! GC- general contractor. From my experience, in these kinds of lawsuit cases the plaintiff names everyone involved, down to the smallest of consultants. Let God err.. courts sort it all out. Having personally seen Gehry's office construction details for other projects, I'd definitively say that there is plenty of thought placed at avoiding the issues that are currently plaguing the project. The field execution of said details may be another issue, but there are plenty of safety measures (mock-ups, water pressure tests, etc) to ensure the quality of built components. It will ultimately come down to the front end (Conditions of The Contract) of the design manual to figure out who is in charge of quality control. In this particular case, Gehry's design is not that much unlike other projects he's previously constructed. If it was a fundamental flaw in design, then his other projects should exhibit similar problems.
On a related subject, I am an Architect who currently works as a technical design consultant, and I am very disappointed at what I've read in this tread so far. "It's schools fault for wanting a design design"? "KISS"??? "There is a reason why buildings need to look boring"?
Truly depressing... Some of my old school pals are slaving away in 'starchitect' offices, rarely getting a weekend off; trying to innovate; to improve on the built environment around us. I sometimes ask them do they know who they are doing this for? Have they ever seen their ultimate end user? Even your end user who may know how write perfect computer code written on just a roll of toilet paper is probably likely to dismiss years of your work in a heartbeat.
Most people just don't care. I am amazed that buildings such as Gehry's ever get built. It's especially demoralizing here in North America... It's burger and fries baby for life...
Yes. We're a different kind of geek here.
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.
Ah... no. They're not. They *might* be a "systems designer" or some other nebulous term, but unless they had diffeqs, modern physics, and other assorted problem solving fun in their education and then use something at that level in their occupation they're not engineers. And yes, I'm taking square aim at my own field: software engineering. It's a fucking joke when compared with other engineering disciplines like mechanical and electrical. In no way is a UML spouting J2EE monkey an engineer. Web people are no more engineers than are MCSEs.
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.
When my cousin got her architecture degree, they required her to take mechanical engineering courses in statics: load calculations for cantilevered vs. supported beams, the like. Architects that are fresh out of school -- or at least the architecture schools I know about -- do indeed consider gravity and infrastructure. It's possible that this wasn't the case when Gehry was in school, or that he's been designing for so long he's stopped looking at the nuts-n-bolts, or that he's so famous he doesn't *have* to care about failures, but in any case, any design that's submitted for building goes straight to the local county/city building department's engineers and they go over the whole thing. Where I live, a lower-income suburb of a small city, I have to submit engineer-signed drawings to build a garage, and the city engineer then goes over those drawings briefly.
To sum up: many competent civil and structural engineers all signed off on the plans for this building.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
"I am amazed that buildings such as Gehry's ever get built"
I'm not. There are lots of idiots with money to blow away, especially if it isn't really their money.
I'm fine with interesting looking buildings. But his buildings don't look that great (they probably looked dated the day they were drawn) and sure looks like many of them don't work well. They are probably the Ford Edsels of architecture.
Anybody can make something different that's crap. And you can often get away with it if you're just making "art". Just like those "artists" throwing paint onto a canvas, or writing songs that are just silence, or just bottling their "unique" excrement in jars.
But if you're making buildings they actually should work.
It takes real talent to make a distinctive looking building that actually works better than other stuff before it.
Take the Pentagon (building) for example. It was an amazing feat of design and engineering given the limitations of time and resources due to the ongoing war. It definitely looks different and it actually worked.
My Steve Jobs building is fine! It's white and has only one door because that's all you need.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
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.