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.

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!”

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.