Stata Center lawsuit
Comments(0) Will there be a oooops! or oh well…that’s the way it is when you gamble?
Frank Gehry, you all probably know his distinct, sometimes controversial work (Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles etc.) is being sued by Massachusetts Institute of Technology for flaws in the Stata Center design that:
caused leaks to spring, masonry to crack, mold to grow, and drainage to back up.
Architecture, much more than any other art form, will always be a compromise between form and function. After all, as the Boston Globe article says:
“you don’t live in a sculpture and users have to live in this building.”
But the thing is… a building like that, though obviously flawed, works on a different level. I just love a comment (#5) in the Chronicle of higher education:
I’m a professor here at MIT, and I must admit that, despite all of the flaws in Gehry’s Stata Center, the building always makes me smile. Yes, it incorporates huge areas of wasted space. Yes, there are hideous traffic flow issues. I dare you to try to find a room there without consulting the help desk. (Forget a building map; even computer technology is not yet advanced enough to map its four-dimensional interior). Yes, the building is for all practical purposes un-useable.
But that skyline!
More often than not I find myself leaning towards the function over form side of the argument (especially in architecture) and have had some heated debates with people with opposite views. But there’s no denying the impact of form on your attitude and overall mood. Yes, more often than not you’ll curse the idiots that designed some stupid feature, but at the end of the day, when you look at a building as a whole… you can’t help but smile. ;)
