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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 ...
Or 1.2 A-Rods in Standard Approximation Units.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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
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!
It's not "Keep It Simple", it's "Sweat The Details". It's not possible to design a big building in Cambridge, MA and have it be simple. For one, there is no soil to speak of. It's all Charles River mud. Every building in that part of Cambridge is basically a concrete boat floating on the mud, sometimes supported by piles down to bedrock, sometimes not.
For another, the extreme temperature changes from summer to winter, and the requirement that the building be heated and cooled from MIT's central steam plant.
Add into that the security, networking, and social interaction requirements, and you have a really complex building before the architect even picks up his light pen. Simplicity is just out. "Managed Complexity" is necessary.
MIT knows a lot about preserving its buildings. Many of its buildings are landmarks and are carefullly preserved. It used to let ivy grow on the outsides of some buildings, in the traditional manner, except the ivy destroys the mortar between the bricks. It's very expensive to replace, so they just ripped out all the ivy. Harvard has also done this.
The external form of a building is really a rather minor point and has little to do with how well it is designed or executed. MIT has parking garages with leaky roofs, You don't need Frank Gehry to design a building with a leaky roof.
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.
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.
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...
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 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?!
The customer hires the architect, and pays the architect. The architect FIRM has unlicensed architects do the real drawings. The architect hires the engineers (Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing, Fire Protection, Structural, Civil, Environment, Landscape, on and on) who have unlicensed engineers in the FIRM do the real drawings. Someone hires the general contractor, probably the architect or recommended by the architect, who, in the GC firm have unlicensed engineers do the project management.
Ultimately the GC will sub out all the real work to the contractors for each trade. They hire the workers who end up putting in the sweat. Gehry may have sketched the design, but a $15 per hour employee did the roof, did the drywall, did the framing, etc.
The architect draws the pretty pictures, and if an engineer says it CAN be done, he'll believe it. If the engineer can prove it, presumably. Most architects are fairly sharp with buildings, believe it or not.
I guarantee you, if the lawyers for Gehry have any common sense they will turn around and sue everyone else with their name on a drawing for that structure. THOSE people will then turn around and sue the subs who did the work, claiming they didn't follow the drawings or used sub-par materials or whatever. This will turn into a grand mess. The engineers and architects (I presume?) have liability insurance, and the only real winners are the lawyers.
I worked for an engineering firm who was named in a lawsuit where a building was designed right but parts were installed terribly. The fingerpointing was massive.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name