After buildup, MIT center is a letdown
All hail Frank Gehry,triumphant architectural genius/creator of MIT's $300 million Stata Center jumbly pile and of the Wyborowa vodka bottle!
This is the week that MIT formally dedicates what it calls Building 32, its new, Gehry-designed Ray and Maria Stata Center for Computer, Information and Intelligence Sciences. Separately, Pernod Ricard USA plans to start selling the legendary Polish vodka in a Gehry-designed bottle this month.
MIT has scheduled a press walk-through for tomorrow, but you know how impatient I am. I toured the building last week and heard some comments that probably will not be included in this week's adulatory Gehry-fest.
The building is a complete mess, although, in fairness, it is still a job site. There are cracks in the flooring and in the poured concrete columns, broken glass in skylights, and exposed plywood panels everywhere; this last element is part of Gehry's interior design.
Less easy to explain away are a bathroom door that opens directly to a view of a urinal, and unused metal wiring trays snaking along every wall, about 6 1/2 feet off the ground. They hold almost no wiring, because MIT officials decided to run wires under the floors instead. MIT lecturer Chris Terman, an advocate for the building's occupants, says the trays will eventually be used: "If you come back in six months there will be a lot more."
Here is a curious note on the office door of professor Randall Davis: "Professor Davis can be found to your left by the window, due to toxic (?) gas odors in this office." Terman says that office has been plagued by ventilation issues "which we've been working to fix."
"Let me show you my office," were the first words I heard from Harold Abelson, professor of electrical engineering and computer science. I'll have to have my vision checked, because I didn't see an office; rather I saw a student lounge where Abelson's office was supposed to be.
Abelson's lab group has already contacted an architect who specializes in interior design about redoing their part of Gehry's masterpiece. "People don't know how to live in this building. There has been very little attention paid to planning for an open-space environment," Abelson says. But I thought the Stata Center already had an architect -- oh, never mind.
"Let me tell you why I don't like this building," professor Joel Moses volunteers, standing in front of a detailed Stata Center floor plan. Moses, a former MIT provost, points out his own "neighborhood" -- a quadrant of offices bounded by two streets, a bathroom, stairwells, and elevators. "It's an inflexible design. The building will be here a hundred years, but the occupants will change. We are broken up into little tribes, because that's how Dertouzos saw the world -- tribally." (The late Michael Dertouzos, former head of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, was a key player in the creation of the Stata Center.)
"I don't mind the outside," Moses notes. "The inside could give us trouble." He also praised, as others did, the unusual diagonal sight lines of Gehry's design, which allow the eye to roam where occasionally the body cannot. (The building's complicated system of locks and radio-frequency ID passes has not been completely worked out yet.) I heard no complaints about the technological infrastructure, and praise for the gorgeous classrooms.
Perhaps most amusingly, some professors at the Stata Center recently received an e-mail urging them to contribute money for Richard Sobol, a photographer who helped create a puffy coffee-table book just published by the MIT Press, "to document the final stages of construction this spring and a fully inhabited Stata Center in the fall." The worshipful tome provides a forum for Gehry to expatiate upon his magnificent work of genius. ("When it's all done, it's going to fit the context pretty nicely," Gehry modestly opines of his own work.)
The e-mail from a department head notes that Sobol needs another $12,000 to $15,000: "If each of your units will put up $3k, [Electrical Engineering and Computer Science] will take care of the rest." Yes! Money well spent! All hail Frank Gehry, triumphant architectural genius/
creator of MIT's $300 million Stata Center jumbly pile and of the Wyborowa vodka bottle!
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.
