M.I.T. Sues Frank Gehry, Citing Flaws in Center He Designed

Artistic freedom and basic engineering reality collide.

November 7, 2007
M.I.T. Sues Frank Gehry, Citing Flaws in Center He Designed

By ROBIN POGREBIN and KATIE ZEZIMA

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has sued the architect Frank Gehry and a construction company, claiming that “design and construction failures” in the institute’s $300 million Stata Center resulted in pervasive leaks, cracks and drainage problems that have required costly repairs.

The center, which features angular sections that appear to be falling on top of one another, opened to great acclaim in the spring of 2004. Mr. Gehry once said that it “looks like a party of drunken robots got together to celebrate.”

The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, was filed in Suffolk County Superior Court in Boston last week and first reported yesterday in The Boston Globe. It accuses Mr. Gehry’s firm, Gehry Partners, based in Los Angeles, of negligence and breach of contract in the design of the center, which houses laboratories, classrooms, offices and meeting rooms.

In an interview, Mr. Gehry, whose firm was paid $15 million for the project, said construction problems were inevitable in the design of complex buildings.

“These things are complicated,” he said, “and they involved a lot of people, and you never quite know where they went wrong. A building goes together with seven billion pieces of connective tissue. The chances of it getting done ever without something colliding or some misstep are small.”

“I think the issues are fairly minor,” he added. “M.I.T. is after our insurance.”...cont'd

I have friends who live near the EMP. I remember when it was being built that they all were hoping they wouldn't get the purple view.

Who designed the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? I can't remember offhand, but I do recall that it produced such a glare between the lake and the snow that people were having car accidents and injuring themselves.

I'm sorry, but I think Frank Gehry is an ass. People have to LOOK at those monstrosities he designs.

Don't even get me started on the scam artist who did the Seattle Public Library.

At the very least Gehry is injecting some creativity in American architecture. We need it badly.

Where creativity and beauty can meet.

No, I don't want cookie cutter buildings. I also don't want an ecologically unsound, moldy building that looks like a pile of vomit.

Granted, every city can't look like Paris, but Frank Gehry is a classic case of Indulgence Architecture, of which I am not a fan.

I don't like Gehry's work, but in all fairness, there's usually plenty of screw-ups in construction. Especially if cheaper materials than the architect specified are used.

I wouldn't particularly want to work or live in them. They are more like sculpture.
And like all good art they are culturally important. For me,Gehry's buildings are symbols of the deconstruction or the 'implosion' of our western linear perspective and infrastructure. Even their appearance of 'falling' and apparent danger challenges our fears and security issues. In that sense I like them as representatives of where we are as a culture.

I read a very interesting article once that talked about the aesthetics of buildings and how they can affect people. Buildings that did not follow natural shape patterns, for example, could cause mental distress. If the angles or colors were not natural, there was cognitive dissonance.

It may be that there are some who would embrace or welcome this. I, on the other hand, have to look out my window at the Seattle Public Library. Aesthetically, from the outside, it is unpleasing. Moreover, it is barely different from the functional (and ugly) 1950s building that was there before. Both are/were metallic and boxy and approximately the same height.

Worse, the Seattle library is unsafe. A friend of mine was injured on their opening day tour. I also know someone who wouldn't take her children there (and she was a librarian) because the children's section was full of wood, metal, and sharp angles.

I myself experienced my one and only case of seasickness (and I am in boats a lot!) in their bile-colored elevators.

I still say it's Indulgence Architecture. I like modern art, BTW. But when you put these buildings in a place where people have no choice but to view or use them, there is a difference.

Gehry was drawn to archtecture at this particular time and place.

And one could also argue that our culture IS 'indulgent' and our art/archit. a reflection of this uglier or imbalanced part of our times. The mirror never lies, even if we would prefer it tell us how beautiful we are. And some find beauty in that truth.

When our collective values change, so changes our cultural fabric and its look.
As I stated, I'm not a fan of that style, but I do see its value and understand why it's considered important work to many people. Yes the art world can be very much a clique, self indulgent and self referencing, but many other artists are countering this type of work with a more 'humanistic' and user friendly public/interactive quality to name just one movement. Movements and counter movements. That's how life is....organic and always changing. Of course artists' response to the times is just one voice and the public has a voice too....all part of the dialogue and process, so I'd never suggest you didn't have the right to speak your mind about this either. But artists have never been fully embraced by our culture as they are in others (ever been to Italy?) for their true roles as collective/tribal shaman and soothsayers, probably in part because art has become a commodity, and other Western puritanical value issues. But that's a very broad topic for discussion.

And tastes change too. Sometimes we appreciate something more in retrospect rather than when it first appears on the scene. Some art/architecture challenges us, some works at enhancing our mood, plays with our experience of space and place, etc. It's all good imo because it is always reflecting the collective back to itself (even if not YOU personally). And I'm always fascinated by that and would hate it if we ever stopped that creative flow because we simply didn't like something at some particular time.

Let me ask you this: do you have to look at any of this out of your window at home or work?

I do. I think that makes an enormous difference.

I just about cry when I see them knocking down the classic old buildings with beautiful architectural detailings, wood floors, brass fittings.

I love Van Gogh, but I think you've made my point. I can choose whether or not to look at his paintings. I cannot choose whether I have to look at the EMP or the Seattle Public Libary. I would also argue that the SPL has proved to be astoundingly unfunctional. They have had to make adjustment after adjustment to make the space suit its function. At first, they had to provide additional space for books. They had to soften up the children's area so that it wasn't dangerous. They had to provide more public space for people to read. The escalators also would shoot past some of the floors - you'd want to go to Fiction, but couldn't becuase the escalator would send you past it! Seriously, they didn't stop at every floor. Finally, the city had to spend about $50K to hire someone to create signage and directional signals so that people knew where to go (e.g., when I went there first, I never once saw the so-called core of the building, a red twisting spiral). This person was called a Way-Finder.

People who don't have to actually use the library write rave reviews.

And I'm sorry you have to look at what you don't like. And you have every right to voice your opinions, complaints, etc.

But it doesn't really answer the bigger question about the arts and their place and purpose.

Many artists IN THEIR TIME were thought to be poor at what they did, or their challenges to style, technique, subject matter and the 'acceptable' aesthetic were thought blasphemous, ugly, counter to the culture. NOW we hold them in great esteem (even those we would not personally choose to hang over our couch or be built across the street), because the changable limited mindset of their times is indeed transitory while the true essense of the work...its soul...lives on. It has significance and exists both within its time and beyond the constrictions of its time. So that is all I'm saying....a broader and longer perspective and an openness to what something you don't like can bring to the table of our understanding as much as what we DO like.

But there is also a difference when the art itself takes over and begins to direct thought, feeling, function. Then it ceases to become art and becomes propaganda. I believe that art is something you should be able to look at and interpret. I don't think it should propagandize how people feel. I'm not expressing this correctly, but say, e.g., a building caused people to feel angry and hostile, creating an angry and hostile environment, not reflecting one? I think that's what some of this architecture does.

And, much of the architecture doesn't translate from the theoretical to the usable. The SPL is not usable. I work two blocks away. I don't feel that I can go there and curl up with a magazine for my lunch hour. They discourage that. They purposely, for example, built the revolving doors so that you can't find the handles (and, they are about 20 feet tall). They did this on purpose so that homeless people couldn't easily come in to find a warm place in cold weather. I call that a showpiece, a resume builder, not a public space.

Maybe in 100 years everyone will be living and working in (and enjoying the look of!) crooked, non-functional, energy inefficient, horrendously expensive buildings. I'm inclined to think that this won't be the case, but I could be wrong.

Oh, and PS - artists like Van Gogh and Cezanne were willing to live in poverty to achieve their artistic vision. I don't think that Frank Gehry is that self-sacrificing.

Me and my son. I think it's the disconnect in the unlevel floors and the straight lines of the stacks. I told my son the Seattle library is a cross between a parking garage and Space Mountain. ugh.

There's a college here in Fla (Lakeland, I think?) that has a Wright designed building that has leaked badly for decades. Seems to me the architects could do better, after all, a building has to be functional as a building or it simply becomes very expensive sculpture. However, clients should be aware of possible problems when a building's design is "out there" and be willing to live with it.

the building in the first place and save 15 million