Stata Center: Gehry's San Gimignano for Science
Architectural Record, August 2004
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When word got out that the architect was proposing to model the 720,000-square-foot Stata Center at MIT on an orangutan village, there were those who thought Frank Gehry had finally succumbed to some kind of architectural delirium. A primate palace as the crown jewel of the campus’ $1-billion building program? Imagine the teeth-grinding in high places.
Orangutan life was discussed, but in the context of creating what is arguably the most sociologically complex building erected on a campus in recent years. Along a dreary stretch of once-industrial Vassar Street, Gehry has conjured yet another eye-popping assemblage of curvy silos and angled towers exposing a bit of columnar leg (“there’s a lot of Fred & Ginger in it,” Gehry noted in a telephone interview, referring to a 1996 office-building project in Prague). Alluring as the exterior is, the story of this building is inside, where its Piranesian spatial intricacy aspires to let research leap old boundaries.
The building started out as a way to bring together several related programs in the computer sciences. It evolved, according to MIT Provost Robert Brown (who joined the project at the beginning as dean of the school of engineering) because the researchers wanted “a sense of community and a structure and openness among themselves to optimize the way they work and interact.”
Everyone’s heard this before. Making idea sharing possible is part of the program of virtually every research building. At MIT, this desire got elevated to an obsession and elaborated to a mind-boggling level of complexity. Why?
Two trends drove this $300-million commitment by MIT, according to William Mitchell, who was involved very early as dean of the architecture school and now runs its legendary Media Lab. “Most significant research gets done by research groups and research teams; its very much a social process,” he said. Also, “A huge amount of what’s important and interesting happens where fields intersect and cross over.” Scientists have had to declare ivory-tower solitude all but dead, he explained. The competitive demands of science today demanded the focus on communities of research and on dissolving traditional boundaries.
The focus on easy interaction and collaboration emerged early in the programming process, but deciding how these goals would be realized took years to figure out. “These guys are iconoclasts,” said Frank Gehry by telephone from his office in Santa Monica. “They hide out in their offices. They’re loners and don’t want to talk to each other. But they’re also ambivalent. They want to talk to each other.” It was one of the most in-depth -- and contentious -- program processes the firm was ever involved in, according to Craig Webb, the project designer at Gehry Partners.
“Put their heads in a new place”
“I predicted that people would tell us what they wanted without realizing that what they described was what they already had,” said Gehry. That’s exactly what happened, and it seemed to create an impasse. To “put their heads in a different place,” explained Webb, the firm made models using analogies drawn from other cultures to illustrate possible social models of research. Shoji screens in a “Japanese house” suggested highly malleable realms of public and private. Gehry: “they hated that.” A Colonial Mansion fixed public areas below private offices. “It raised the issues of privacy versus flexibility and proximity to the workplace,” explained Webb. “They hated that too,” said Gehry. Rachel Allen, a staffer in Gehry’s office, came up with the idea of using examples from animal communities. One model featured an architectural prairie dog town. With private spaces below, “you would ‘pop your head up’ to see what others are doing in the communal space,” explained Webb.
Then came the orangutans. Since family groups spend their days together on the ground but sleep in separate nests in trees, the firm made a model that placed spaces for quiet, private work a level above areas for meeting, relaxing and conversation. They hated that, too, said Gehry. “They thought we were calling them orangutans. But it started the conversation, and made what we’ve built possible.”
Out of those conversations came a building that makes, as Mitchell calls it “a broth of people to enable new intersections of thought and ideas to happen.” The most public realm is the ground floor “student street.” According to Provost Brown, the university “needed a space that was open and accessible to the whole MIT community.” A report commissioned by the institute had underlined an imperative to make student life more amenable, not just to attract the best (though this was certainly an important reason), but because students too often have found high-pressure technology environments socially isolating, and too many suffered for it -- a few even taking their own lives.
So MIT added to the academic program a fitness center, daycare center, classrooms, and food service. This street, festooned with intertwining overhead stairways and chunks from the floors above plunging through the ceiling, urges students to slow down by offering eddies of space fitted out with zigzag built-in benches, computer terminals, and blackboards.
Added John Guttag, head of the department of electrical engineering and computer science, “One of the things it took us awhile to understand is that there were layers of community. Faculty members had their students, then slightly larger groups of faculty and their students. So the idea of a neighborhood emerged, where the people you expected to see every day would be.”
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