Building Stata : The Design and Construction of Frank O. Gehry's Stata Center at MIT

Rating:
Summary: There's a better book to be written about this building
Review: Beautiful photos of Gehry's striking new building at MIT and some useful technical details about the construction process. If that's what you want, buy this book. The building is indeed very interesting to look at.

But if you want an actual assessment of the Stata Center, skip this book. The text is more notable for what it leaves out than what it includes. I speak with some knowledge: I work there!

Completely missing from this book is any sense of how disfunctional much of the building is. Perhaps you can catch a whiff of this in the way Gehry dismisses the requests and needs of the building's future occupants, who (silly fools!) tell him that they want offices that resemble the ones they were used to. God forbid scientists should want spaces that suits their needs, in preference to Gehry's artistic ideas about what they *should* want.

The book doesn't tell you about the very mixed results of Gehry's overbearing vision. Let's start with the researchers who must contend with tiny offices, Dilbert-like cubicles or desks in public spaces, instead of the good workspaces many of them were used to and deserve. Let's continue with faculty offices whose weirdly sloping walls can't take bookcases or blackboards. How about elevators that open onto "seminar rooms", every-other-floor bathrooms, dangerous spiral staircases, the horrible acoustics that magnify random noises (but make it impossible to have a conversation across a table), or the cracks now appearing all over the lobby floor? None of that is in this book, nor is the fact that some units have now hired architects to redo their space.

There's a good book to be written about the Stata Center. It might be a book about what happens when artistic vision (and a grand vision it is!) is allowed to trump the practical needs of a building's occupants. But we'll have to wait for that book. If you buy this one, enjoy the pictures, but take the whole thing with a grain of salt.