Stata Me Up

Photo by Stephen Downes via Flickr, under Creative Commons license.

This is the Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, designed by renowned architect, Frank Gehry.  (That link leads to the site of a 2001 exhibition on Gehry at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, partially underwritten by - ahem - Enron.)

Photo by koalie, via Flickr, under Creative Commons license.

This is the Stata Center in the snow, a condition that has been known to occur in Massachusetts with almost annual frequency. 

Snow, unfortunately, does not mix as well with world-class architecture as might be hoped.  Professor Althouse points us today to a Boston Globe report on the exotic building's real world troubles:

• "MIT sues Gehry, renowned architect of daring $300m Stata Center"

Details:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has filed a negligence suit against world-renowned architect Frank Gehry, charging that flaws in his design of the $300 million Stata Center in Cambridge, one of the most celebrated works of architecture unveiled in years, caused leaks to spring, masonry to crack, mold to grow, and drainage to back up.

The suit says that MIT paid Los Angeles-based Gehry Partners $15 million to design the Stata Center, which was hailed by critics as innovative and eye-catching with its unconventional walls and radical angles.  But soon after its completion in spring 2004, the center's outdoor amphitheater began to crack due to drainage problems, the suit says.  Snow and ice cascaded dangerously from window boxes and other projecting roof areas, blocking emergency exits and damaging other parts of the building, according to the suit.  Mold grew on the center's brick exterior, the suit says, and there were persistent leaks throughout the building.

Not surprisingly, the architects blame the engineers who blame the contractors who blame the subcontractors and so on down the line.  And we can safely assume that everyone is busily tendering the suit to their respective insurers.

Professor Althouse applies the Socratic method:

Do you want a wild and crazy building dreamed up by an artist?  Stop and think whether all the less strange buildings look the way they do for a reason.

It takes only until the third comment for someone to invoke Frank Lloyd Wright -- whose flat-roofed buildings are notorious for their leaky qualities.  An aesthetic brief for the defense of Wright in particular and buildings-as-art in general can be found here:

Wright's attitude to his buildings, and to his clients and their use of those buildings, is best summed up in his (in)famous retort to a client who, at first, bitched to Wright about the leaks in the roof of his new house.  Said Wright, 'That's what happens when you leave a work of art out in the rain.'

True enough, but one doubts that MIT will be convinced.

~~~

UPDATE 111007:  Donn Zaretsky's Art Law Blog, no surprise, has been following the MIT-Gehry dispute closely over the past several days:

• His initial report (with much-appraciated Decs&Excs citation) is here.

• A follow-up with thoughts on "assumption of the risk" in dealing with cutting-edge architecture [cf. the Frank Lloyd Wright quotation, supra] is here.

• And most recently, he has helpfully provided a link to the MIT-Gehry Complaint.