Modern Architecture [Chortle]
I assume most of you have heard the news, but the story in today's Boston Globe made me grin--MIT sues Gehry, citing leaks in $300m complex--Blames famed architect for flaws at Stata Center. Heh. Quite amusing, in light of various architecture rants that I've done in the past.
Incidentally, the Stata Center has provided endless amounts of fun on previous visits. For instance, when my advisor & chief grad student were in town in 2004, we wandered around to look for the leaks and fixes--we basically had a case study on how to do lots of details wrong:
Ouija, Drea, and I stopped by Crusher's office back in 2006--it was great--you look out the window, and see dumb details!
Huh... I wonder what those white streaks are...
Huh.. maybe this might have to do with the fact that you're using brick as a FLAT ROOF, and BRICK LEAKS. Oh wait... looks like you have weep holes all right. Except no kickout flashing, so it just drools down the face of the building. Swell.
On a more serious note, what browns me off is this paragraph of the article:
An executive at Skanska's Boston office yesterday blamed Gehry for problems with the project and said Gehry ignored warnings from Skanska and a consulting company prior to construction that there were flaws in his design of the amphitheater.
"This is not a construction issue, never has been," said Paul Hewins, executive vice president and area general manager of Skanska USA. He said Gehry rejected Skanska's formal request to create a design that included soft joints and a drainage system in the amphitheater, and "we were told to proceed with the original design."
So Gehry--you actually had adult supervision involved here, who knew how to put together buildings where it RAINS (say, unlike Southern California, where your offices are), and when they warned you to change some dumb details, you IGNORED them?? I can easily imagine the meeting: "We'd like to implement your solution, but that adds a shadow line to the parapet, and that's just unacceptable to this signature design." I'm just hoping that they get as nailed as possible in the lawsuit.
Perhaps you can paint me as a Philistine, but in general, artistes gone wild (and into their own world, ignoring their audience) truly annoy me. Literature should have, somewhere in there, characters and a story that I find interesting. Music should be listenable, instead of a complex intellectual exercise that is ultimately unlistenable ("Goddammit, didn't we get this motherfuckin' Pierre Boulez Marteau sans Maitre-style bullshit out of our systems already?") (apologies for the foul language, but twelve-tone music really does that to me). And buildings should, ultimately, functional as shelter, without leaking, without being a maintenance nightmare, and without being an energy sieve.
posted by Bats @ 10:53 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
A-freakin-men, brutha!
I think architecture in particular has a duty to at least consider usability and not to be hostile, because it is imposed on its audience. I can decide whether or not I want to read a book, or watch a movie, but I don't get to decide what buildings I look at as I walk down the street or what kind of building I'm going to work (and even to some extent, live) in.
But that whole campus is full of stupid buildings! I mean, two words: Media Lab.
I am much more concerned about how The Crystal at the ROM survives winters. I keep imagining an avalanche falling on some unsuspecting person passing on the street.
Additional information from the New York Times article:
In an interview, Mr. Gehry, whose firm was paid $15 million for the project, said construction problems were inevitable in the design of complex buildings.
“These things are complicated,” he said, “and they involved a lot of people, and you never quite know where they went wrong. A building goes together with seven billion pieces of connective tissue. The chances of it getting done ever without something colliding or some misstep are small.”
Mr. Gehry said “value engineering” — the process by which elements of a project are eliminated to cut costs — was largely responsible for the problems.
“There are things that were left out of the design,” he said. “The client chose not to put certain devices on the roofs, to save money.”
There's some truth to those issues, but everything I've heard so far seems to point a lot of culpability at Gehry. For instance, insurance companies are the ones who end up paying out the damages in the end.
But one of the lessons I've found in my line of work: if you hear any or more of these terms, your building is likely to have problems:
Fast track
Value engineered
Award winning
Sounds like this one got two out of three--danger, danger!
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