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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+
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.
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
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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!
They have their mail address encoded as:
mailto: webmaster@csail.mit.edu
That's world class brains for ya!
No way a spam harvest bot is going to decode that.
That's why they get the big bucks.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
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..
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.
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.
So you need three imaginary people and an engineer?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
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.
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.