Stata Center
November 12th, 2007 by Walt
I see here and here that MIT is suing Frank Gehry over his design of the Stata Center (it leaks, among other problems):
From the pictures it looks quite pretty. I’d be curious to hear if it looks worse in person.
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November 12th, 2007 at 2:27 am
I too have seen it only in pictures, and I too kind of like it. Although I get the impression that you don’t admit such things in polite company…
November 12th, 2007 at 8:28 am
Plenty of the people who work in the building (and I can see my office window from that picture) like the way it looks, both inside and out. I love photos like the one above. And on the inside, there are a couple of places that have spectacular views — cutting across multiple floors, large internal spaces, you can’t tell what’s inside and what’s outside, etc.
It’s not the views that are annoying, it’s things like … the way it leaks when it rains, the way the floor-plans are so confusing that visitors always get lost, the way one of the seminar rooms has wall-paneling that gives everyone vertigo. The way that a lot of the spaces for grad students had serious noise problems. The way the elevator-lobby doors are always broken (and there aren’t enough elevators anyway). The slanted walls that don’t hold bookshelves, and the columns in the middle of the hallways. The way that different parts of the floors come together with a ‘gap’, so you have to have little four-foot elevators for wheelchair accessibility, scattered all over the place. The way that the value-engineering after they added the parking garage, late in construction, meant that a lot of the stuff inside the building (furniture, dividers, spiral staircases) feels “cheap.”
It’s not a bad building, and it’s beautiful in places. But it can be sort of annoying to work in. A lot of people (maybe not everyone) miss the old LCS building.
November 12th, 2007 at 10:36 am
I haven’t had to work inside Building 32, just attend talks and the like, so the little inconveniences mentioned above haven’t bothered me too many times. In fact, I rather like the interior: it reminds me of a children’s science museum, or the Platonic ideal thereof. I keep wanting to run off and find the exhibit where we play with the bubbles!
November 14th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
I used to eat lunch at the faculty lunchroom on the 2nd floor quite often. There is a conference room adjacent to the lunchroom where several tall, vertical whiteboards have been installed. The reason I was told is that the odd angles in the room were giving people headaches and even causing dizziness until the whiteboards returned some “verticality” to the room.
November 16th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
Walking by Stata every day, one easily takes for granted the refreshing art that the building brings to the campus. My dormitory, Simmons hall, is quite the spectacle as well, and sadly, in addition to practical concerns (building navigation, bad wireless connectivity/cell reception, wasted space, etc.) we have to worry about architect letting themselves in an taking photos.
I like Simmons, despite the annoyances, because in addition to being new, there is the surreal balance in which it can seem perfectly normal living here day-to-day, but when I take a step back and look at the whole thing, I think to myself “Holy crap, I live in that!”
November 19th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
I’ve walked by it and enjoy looking at it.
I didn’t know the Stata building leaked, but I once heard something funny about how Gehry designs buildings like the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao.
From what I gather, he sketches their overall shape, and then his flunkies use a computer to crank out mathematical formulas for zillions of individual tiles. I think they use a cubic spline or something. So far this sounds very sophisticated. But then they get more flunkies to warp and bend metal tiles to approximate the desired shapes. This process creates lots of visible ripples and imperfections. So, the result is far from mathematically perfect.
January 22nd, 2008 at 8:17 am
Has anyone anything to say about whether or not those who work in the Stata Center are actually producing the same caliber and quantity of innovations and innovative ideas that came out of MIT’s former site, Building 20?
January 23rd, 2008 at 10:38 am
The next trend-obsessed commitee that wants a building from Frank Gehry could save their clientele a lot of inconvenience and expense by commissioning a 1/16 scale model from Gehry and parking it in the lobby, where everybody could still get that patented “Gehry Giggle” as they walk into a building designed by another architect as something besides a visual joke.
January 28th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
ha. i took the above photo. it’s a very nice building. i don’t think you can see the defects from the outside but i’ve heard it’s a strange building to work in.