Frank Gehry has died (opens in new tab)

> He wanted to offend.

Sounds like a lot of architects these days.

Notably this Onion piece was added to the home page of MIT’s architecture department the year my cohort of grad students moved from LCS into the newly opened Stata center.

The building was was fun to explore, but had a number of defects that suggested its designer was a big-picture not a details guy.

Not surprising to hear. I mean Gehry has always been more flair than quality. His studio has probably weakest execution from all of the star architects. But it's a great brand i guess thats why you hire Gehry.

Wow you weren't kidding. The insides of that looks like an absolute hellscape. Like a whole floor is missing and they just set up shop in a warehouse!

I’ve spent some time there, and it did seem like a building that was primarily designed for satellite view — never mind what goes on inside.

Same. Echo chamber hell. I appreciated the modernness of the interior as a design nerd, though it was uncomfortable as a primary desk for all the reasons you’ve said. Never mind the never ending flood of visitors up and down the walkways.

The roof was the main reprieve about the entire environment, wonderfully maintained and honestly a blessing to escape the main campus.

Nonetheless. Frank is a legend, very fortunate to have been able to been able to experience his work on a daily basis.

I saw the (a?) architectural model for Stata before it was built. I was with an artist, and we just walked into somewhere it had been set up for an event. (Yay for MIT culture of letting students go most places on campus.) It looked pretty crazy at the time. IIRC, there was a clear sphere embedded in the top of one of the lower roofs. My joke was that the model looked like someone had taken a paperweight, and smashed up a previously ordinary-looking building. It was crazy when construction started, and you could start to see elements of the building emerge, like, they are actually building that. (Though they left out the paperweight sphere.)

Before it was built, a designer friend, who'd worked worked in a Stata building before, mentioned the frequent complaints of Gehry buildings, such as people in triangular offices, or with slanting walls, that couldn't fit a desk.

Years later, I was surprised and deligted to end up working in Stata. My office was pretty generic rectangular and functional, with big windows that opened. No complaints about the office, except the HVAC couldn't win against the early GPU compute my officemate was doing. Space in the building was in demand by everyone, yet there were large areas of dead space. I wondered whether some of the conspicuously unused space was because they could've figured out how to adapt it, but was being banked consciously, so that space could be made for PIs who arrived later.

Stewart Brand criticized IM Pei's building for the original Media Lab (E15), as not being malleable like the "temporary" Building 20, and maybe some of the same criticism applied. Though Stata, coincidentally built partly on the site of Building 20 that was razed for it, did incorporate plywood elements in the interior, I think as a nod to Building 20. This included large plywood tables that were moved around as needed for different purposes in the open ares outside the elevator on my floor (G10?), multiple times a day.

The strange bathroom placement, and the ones that used visibly dirty ("green") water to flush, weren't a practical problem, but multiple times were awkward to explain to visitors. I liked the big single-person bathrooms on the office floors, and they were luxurious for students and professors doing all-nighters to get in a discreet paper towel bath, compared to the indignity of trying to do it in a toilet stall.

One thing I liked about the larger building design was the main street ground floor, adding cafe and various random seating, which was a big improvement over the Infinite Corridor.

I toured at MIT when I was applying to colleges, and the student narrating the walking tour trash-talked the Stata Center pretty brutally as we went by it, mentioning the leaks, the lawsuit, how nobody liked it, etc.

I never knew if those were her actual feelings or if this was part of a script approved by the admissions office, or even which of those possibilities would be crazier.

The building replaced a beloved Ww2 era temporary structure that lasted 50 Years.

Making a statement with architecture rarely goes well, especially if you abandon rectilinear structures.

https://www.rle.mit.edu/media/undercurrents/Vol9_2_Spring97....

“ neglige0nce”

Weird article. Maybe OCR?

This is the starchitect shtick - build sculptural forms that can, incidentally, be used as buildings. It's literally the most superficial kind of architecture.

It's much harder and less self-indulgent to start from a human-scale brief for a working and/or living environment and build a functional triumph that is also visually striking and original.

You can get away with being transgressive and challenging™ for art galleries and museums, but offices and homes need a whole other level of integration.

Two random anecdotes: when the concept drawing were first shown to the graduate students, someone asked what the swooping walkways above the main corridor were for. The answer they gave was "lightsaber battles".

When we first moved in, there was a seminar room that made some people physically nauseous due to its sloping walls. For a time, they were trying to use masking tape on the walls to make the effect less pronounced. Some of the grad students tried to name it the "vomitorium", but the name never stuck. Fortunately,, once the room had a full compliment of chairs, furniture, and a projector screen the effect seemed to be much less pronounced.

nice!

Yeah, I used to have to borrow my son's gaming computer to calculate toolpaths in pyCAM....

I toured that building when I was looking for a place, and just so happened to be there when there was recess or something. The loud noise of kids was definitely a significant factor in me not signing a lease.

Is Calatrava worse? I always thought he came from understanding physics/engineering and their process exploits that.

Gehry is somebody whos work someone else has to figure out how to build.