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."

Comments

I don't remember Building 20 leaking

[dpbsmith]

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.

Vision over Practicality

[pz]

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.

Re:Vision over Practicality

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true; the building is broken by design. I do work in the Stata Center, and it is as bad as everyone says it is.

The seminar room you mention ("Kiva") is unbelievably disorienting; the problem goes far beyond perforated plywood, which certainly accentuates the problem. The walls jut in and out at odd angles, and lean inward and askew as they climb to an offcenter window. I find the room nauseating; visitors I've brought by don't believe that the floor is actually level, the effect is so strong.

Security in the building is a complete joke, as there is no logic to the organization and separation of space, requiring complex electronically controlled access policies that are fundamentally broken.

HVAC in the building is horrible, although I understand that this is the case in many places, and was certainly the case in our previous building, NE-43.

Navigation is a nightmare; when people are lost in the building, I often lead them to where they want to go. There's no point trying to explain it to them, because the layout is so nontraditional that it defies simple explanation.

Office spaces are a mixed bag; some are beautiful spaces with recessed windows that make nice sitting areas. Others are cramped cubicles or have columns jutting through the middle.

I don't object to daring design-- it's just that Gehry seems to go out of his way to make things unusable.

There's a brief interview with Gehry in the film "My Architect" about Louis Kahn, and Gehry was interviewed in his architectural office, and it's as traditional as you could imagine: a big rectangular room with drafting tables. That settled it for me: it's not just hubris; he's an asshole. He sits in his comfortable space and designs expensive torture chambers; there's a Gehry-designed level of hell awaiting him.