Showy buildings go up, while MIT sues designer of its own

World-famous architect Frank Gehry was sued by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology over alleged flaws in the construction of the Stata Center (above). (Bizuayehu tesfaye/ap photo)

Architecture continued to be a hot topic in 2007. By hot I mean it's on the front burner culturally. We notice it, we talk about it, we love it or, very often, we hate it. We may even travel to see it. (If so, we become "architourists.") We demand that it be better.

The most highly touted and maybe the best US building of the year was the astonishing Bloch Building, a wing of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Architect Steven Holl, best known here for his Simmons dorm at MIT, added a series of glassy galleries that spill down a green hillside, each gallery looking like an iceberg heaving itself up out of the ground. Because the museum is free of charge, visitors can move in and out at will, going between the indoor galleries and the outdoor sculpture gardens.

Also a winner was the New Museum of Contemporary Art on the Bowery in New York by the Japanese firm that calls itself SANAA. Galleries shaped like boxes are piled into a tower, then surfaced with an aluminum mesh as if they were being wrapped for a holiday. At moderate cost, the building achieved a memorable presence.

Californian Frank Gehry, probably the world's current most famous architect, scored one win and took one penalty flag during the year. The win was the stunning IAC headquarters, near the edge of the Hudson River in Manhattan, which exhausted critics' efforts at metaphor. Does it look like an alp? Like a ship under full sail? Whatever the image, the IAC's billowing glass walls, which seem lightly dusted with snow, help to create magical spaces inside.

The penalty flag was thrown by MIT, which sued Gehry and the builder over alleged flaws in the construction of the 2004 Stata Center. Insurers and lawyers traded charges, and as usual in such cases, it was impossible to sort out yet who, if anyone, was to blame. Some argued that when MIT demanded an innovative building - which it certainly got - it should have expected the unexpected.

MIT was also the site of my favorite small gem of the year, Sol LeWitt's great floor mural, a creation in bright colors and geometric shapes that somehow felt like an ideogram of MIT itself. Another winner was the Macallen Building, a condo complex in a former industrial area of South Boston, an instant landmark with its high sloping shape like a manmade mountain - not a perfect building, but one that exhibits the kind of invention and daring that are too often missing in Boston.

One of the things Bostonians argue about is what architecture to preserve. At least four serious battles were under way at year's end. The H. H. Richardson house in Brookline, home of the great 19th-century architect, made the annual list of the "11 Most Endangered Places" by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Despite this major publicity, no one has stepped forward, as of this writing, to purchase and renovate the house.

Other preservation fights: The Dainty Dot Building in Chinatown (1889), a superb example of Boston commercial architecture, is threatened with demolition or, idiotically, with being first demolished for a new tower and then rebuilt, brick by original brick. Residents of Shady Hill Square in Cambridge (1915), an outstanding example of town planning of the Garden City movement, are in court trying to stave off construction of a large house in the middle of what they thought was their shared green lawn. And Mayor Menino, despite an outcry, still hopes to abandon Boston City Hall (1969), a currently unfashionable (and badly neglected) example of the muscular concrete architecture of its era. In all four cases, I'm on the side of those who wish to preserve.

The best exhibition was the McIntyre show in Salem, an exhibit not of this self-taught master's famous Federal-style houses, but rather of his remarkable wood carvings. The year's biggest event in urban design was the gradual emergence of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway from the construction rubbish of the Big Dig - some of it wonderful, some of it a lot less so, and much of it still to be created if we live long enough. Finally, a professional survey named the Empire State Building as Americans' favorite work of architecture, a pleasing tribute on its 76th birthday for a great Art Deco tower that was long underrated by fundamentalist modernists.

Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.