Hasta La Ideas

Three years ago, MIT decided to sue Frank Gehry and general contractor Skanska USA over leaks and other structural issue in the Stata Center building the two had designed and built for the university. This led to some finger pointing and a nice push for John Silber‘s anti-starchitect book, Architecture of the Absurd (which featured the Stata on its cover). But then things got quiet until just this past April, when to little fanfare it was announced that the suit had finally been settled. So why is writer James S. Russell back to talking about it now with his essay “Bashing Architects with Lawsuit, as MIT Did, Kills Innovation” for Bloomberg? We don’t know, but we enjoyed reading his defense of the building and his argument that details of the suit be made public, so as to learn who exactly was responsible for what and see if there’s anything to learn from the problems MIT was upset about. The leaks captured so much attention after the building was first opened, it’s nice to finally read about how Gehry’s building actually functions.

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