Geeks Crit Gehry

I had a free afternoon in Boston, so I went to see Frank Gehry's much ballyhooed new Stata Center at MIT. It was a rainy day and the building was still about two weeks away from the grand opening: I saw it from the street only.

From that perspective, it was just silly. Are those ski jumps? Or did Gehry want to show that his Case Western building that dumps snow on students' heads wasn't a mistake? (The ski ramps mark a garage entrance and a pedestrian entrance.)

Ski jumps aside, just look at the picture: Is that anyway to make a streetscape?

Re Geeks Crit Gehry: The current issue of Wired has an article about the building which includes comments from some of the tenants:

And then there's the square-corner brigade. As recently as November, with only finish work remaining, one emeritus faculty member informed CSAIL director Brooks that "the slanted walls are unacceptable and must change." Go geeks.

More info below.

From the Wired article:

Given Stata's crew, it's no surprise that a lot of the gripes focus on their caves - or lack thereof. Stata has 370 lockable offices for 1,000 people, and math is something this crowd is good at. When Microsoft comes to recruit, notes one doctoral candidate, "one of their big selling points is: 'Our offices have doors.' With the kind of focused work people do here, spin-up and spin-down times are excessive." (Translation: Distractions are bad.) Gehry's team came up with plywood partitions. To which the grad students answered: Dilbert.

The other great whine is wasted space. The four-story atriums at the bottom of each tower are explained in design specs as accommodating "experiments that require tall spaces, such as those involving remote-control helicopters." You don't need a PhD to spot a rationalization. Says a senior programming researcher: "I've already got an architect looking at what we might do to fill ours in."

And then there's the square-corner brigade. As recently as November, with only finish work remaining, one emeritus faculty member informed CSAIL director Brooks that "the slanted walls are unacceptable and must change." Go geeks.

I couldn't get around to the back of the building this time, which looks more interesting, if a bit too much like Toon Town. I'll go back next time.

Perhaps I should add that I once spent all day driving from Marseille to Bilbao to see Gehry's Guggenheim, which I loved. And I stayed two nights just to see it properly: it's the Stata Center on the street that I found silly, not Gehry.

Jim Kunstler talks about it in his Eyesore of the Month. There's also more about Gehry here.