Dizzying heights

CAMBRIDGE -- People look at its amazing curves and angles and wonder what Martian colony has landed here.

It's the Ray and Maria Stata Center, MIT's new home for "computer, information, and intelligence sciences."

The Stata is a vast pile of labs, offices, classrooms, and meeting rooms, all of it clothed in architecture that looks to most people like the freeze-frame of a Disney animation. Thanks to its famous architect, Frank Gehry, it's the most keenly anticipated new building locally in years, maybe decades.

The Stata is scheduled to open May 7. But on a visit last Monday, it was still a construction site. Visitors pick their way among builders' debris. You don't see a lot of finish work. The May dates are clearly a triumph of hope over reality. It will actually be finished sometime this summer.

But it's not too soon to get a sense of this remarkable building. It's too early to tell how it will work for the students and researchers who'll occupy it. But the guess here is that they'll love it. The Stata is an act of serious architecture.

Coming off two world triumphs -- the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the new Disney Hall in Los Angeles -- Gehry, 75 and a Pritzker Prize winner, is riding higher than any other architect of his generation. At around $300 million total cost, with 400,000 square feet of space aboveground, the Stata is one of his most ambitious efforts.

It may not matter that the Stata won't be finished when it opens. Many years ago it dawned on Gehry that his buildings looked more interesting while they were under construction than when they were finished. Since then, he's sought ways to retain, in the finished building, a sense of something still restless, still happening.

The Stata is always going to look unfinished. It also looks as if it's about to collapse. Columns tilt at scary angles. Walls teeter, swerve, and collide in random curves and angles. Materials change wherever you look: brick, mirror-surface steel, brushed aluminum, brightly colored paint, corrugated metal. Everything looks improvised, as if thrown up at the last moment. That's the point. The Stata's appearance is a metaphor for the freedom, daring, and creativity of the research that's supposed to occur inside it.

But the Stata is more than a
3-D metaphor. It's a place for human habitation. As such, it's been thought about with a lot of intelligence.

Social spaces

The building is basically a three-or-four story podium (it depends on how you count) from which sprout two irregular towers. In interviews, Gehry talks about the social life of orangutans. They retire for privacy at night to the treetops, then come down to the ground when they wish to be social. The Stata imitates that life. The more private labs and offices are up in the two towers, which are named for donors Bill Gates and Alexander Dreyfoos. The social spaces are down in the podium. The best of these is a stunning "student street," a wide, two-story space with brightly colored walls that winds through the whole building and connects up just about everything: classrooms and auditoriums, a day-care center, a fitness center, a dance studio, a cafeteria, and even a pub.

The other thing you can't fail to notice is the terracing. On the Stata's south side, facing the sun, is an artificial hillside of amphitheaters and planted terraces. It slopes up the side of the building for four stories. You can climb up from below, or walk out onto a terrace from inside the building. The terracing is a place for schmoozing, picnicking, and hanging out.

Then there are what you might call the toys. They're the Stata's most memorable feature. These are small pavilions with odd shapes. Most of them stand on the terraces or overlook them. Each has its own form and color. The architects named them after their shapes, and now everyone uses the names: the Star, the Kiva, Achilles, Buddha, Pisa, the Heart, the Helmet, the Giraffe, the Nose, the Twins. Most of the toys are special-purpose rooms. That's why they get special shapes. The playfulness of names and shapes is something you associate more with Sesame Street than MIT. But why shouldn't architecture be fun?

The Stata can look like a big arbitrary sculpture, and in some ways it is. But things that look arbitrary aren't always so. The tilting walls, for instance, open cracks to the sky, through which daylight floods down to the lowest levels. The many-angled walls provide the Stata with a lot of perimeter and a lot of corners -- ideal for the numerous offices, all of which have operable windows.

One of the goals at the Stata was to overcome the secretive quality of MIT's typical dark corridors, lined with closed doors behind which everything happens invisibly. Studies showed that students felt isolated in such surroundings. So at the Stata there is transparency everywhere. Glass walls open views into the heart of labs. You can look from the student street upward through atriums into the towers. The hope is to make work visible and, therefore, educational.

Another idea is to organize most of the research areas as clusters. A typical cluster serves 10 or 15 researchers who share an interest in a double-height space with offices and labs around the outside and a shared area in the middle. The goal here is to encourage interaction among researchers.

Making connections

The Stata is different from much of Gehry's work. It isn't a freestanding look-at-me art object, like the Bilbao museum or Disney Hall. Instead it's tied into its surroundings in every possible way. By means of bridges to its next-door neighbor, it connects with MIT's famous "infinite corridor" grid, the web of corridors that links most of the campus into one huge mega-building. And the Stata reaches out to hold hands with the landmark Alumni Pool, the first American university building designed in modern style. The pool is now part of the Stata's fitness center.

The Stata also reaches out to the city by means of landscape. Noted landscape architect Laurie Olin is doing a master plan for the entire MIT campus. He's trying to give it a more memorable outdoors. At the Stata, he fights the flatness of the site by creating two miniature drumlins, planted with pines and lapped by water, to remind you that you're in Massachusetts. They stand in a public plaza at the corner of Vassar and Main streets. The plaza is conceived as the northern entry to the MIT campus. A huge chrome sign on the Stata, yet to be applied, will announce MIT to the world.

Costs and delays

The Stata has been criticized for taking too long to build and for costing more than its budget. Both criticisms are true. But they're irrelevant. The delays and costs are the result of two factors. Factor one: MIT kept adding new features to the building while it was under design. They included a 700-car underground parking garage and many of the amenities that support social life in the building. The garage was added after design work on the rest of the building was already complete, because the city of Cambridge turned down an MIT proposal to build a garage elsewhere. Factor two: The job was bid at the worst possible time, at the end of the boom of the 1990s and at a moment when the Big Dig was giving Boston builders, especially concrete subcontractors, as much work as they could handle.

You always hear such complaints. I just finished reading a bio of the British architect Christopher Wren. He was criticized for delays and cost overruns on St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Three centuries later, who cares? Does anyone wish he'd cut more corners? We don't overspend on buildings today. We usually don't spend enough. That's why older buildings so often look better and last longer than the products of our own time.

It goes without saying that the Stata couldn't have been designed or built without computers. Gehry's office is a pioneer in computer techniques, and during construction it trained members of the contracting firm, Skanska USA, and the associate architects, Cannon Design of Boston.

It's not possible to come to any final conclusions about the Stata. Much of it is an experiment. Only time will tell how well it works. Will researchers, starved for privacy, tape visual barriers onto those glass walls? Or build themselves huts or tents so they can make a private phone call? Will people feel comfortable in a chapel-like seminar room (the Kiva) rising 45 feet to a skylight? Will lab researchers expand their activities into what are supposed to be social spaces? Will all those colliding walls and roofs really not leak? Will furniture fit against tilted curving walls? Will people mix and spark ideas, or will they hide in corners?

In architecture, you don't get to test a prototype to work out the bugs, the way you do with a new car design. The prototype is the final building. For that reason, new ideas are always a risk. We should come back in a year or two and see how the Stata is actually working. But for now, it's a pleasure to welcome, in conservative red-brick Boston and Cambridge, a work of architecture that embodies serious thinking about how people live and work, and at the same time shouts the joy of invention.

Robert Campbell can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.