Stata Center: Gehry's San Gimignano for Science

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Labs open to the light
What’s called the Warehouse, which stretches over more than 40,000 square feet each on floors two and three, is separated from the student street by vestibules, so that, says Guttag, “this community of researchers is able to circulate freely.” Within it the building cracks itself open: private offices and open workspaces surround two large laboratory spaces at the east and west ends, which rise to enormous sloping skylights framed over the fourth floor. “They needed these high-bay spaces for heavy equipment, for graphics, visualization and robotics,” said Webb. (Other labs are fully segregated.)

A similar but finer grained gradation of space occurs in the two towers that rise from the fifth floor upward. They both curve in a C-shape to focus the action on double-height lounges (each with its own spiral connecting stair) that serve the neighborhoods of researchers. Because they wrap the skylights that top the warehouse labs, you can see from the tops of the towers to the depths of the lowest labs.

The towers and the warehouse come together at the fourth-floor faculty dining space and pub, which spill onto a piazzalike outdoor terrace. Seminar rooms that might have been placed within departments were consciously grouped on this floor, poking through the terrace in a riot of brick, yellow-painted metal, and polished-steel. Everyone mixes while they’re getting their cookies between presentations, explained Guttag.

Real, not virtual community
The spatial intricacy and labyrinthine circulation bear no resemblance to the typical rectangular research structure - rigidly modular and zoned by mechanical services. The specificity of the Stata Center’s form serves the collaborative and interactive agenda generally, rather than wrap specific functional needs. The dead ends and eddies of space are ideal for a quick sit-down, noted Guttag.

One of the reasons the building became so large (420,000 square feet on top of a 300,0000-square-foot garage) is that so many research groups wanted to be near each other. “The lab groups in computer science wanted to be near the groups in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory,” said Webb. To cross-fertilize ideas most efficiently, “they all wanted to be at each other’s boundaries. Finally, they decided they didn’t need the boundaries. So the two groups combined in the middle of this.” (It’s now called CSAIL.)

You would think that this obsession with proximity wouldn’t matter anymore. After all, the building is chock full of people who have invented many of the technologies that are supposed to keep us connected without the inconveniences of personal contact. So where are the gee-whiz interactive gizmos, the virtual communities? “They believe that the old fashioned ways are the right ways,” explained Marantz, “including face-to-face and casual, spontaneous interactions that involve places you can sit or stand in and talk together and write on something.”

Certainly there’s some fear here (and even some resentment) that this is a building intended to social engineer some way of working that becomes obsolete the minute it is occupied. But whether the devotion of such a variety of spaces to collaboration and informal interaction will pay off is the long-term question. “We didn’t measure efficiency in dollars per square foot, explained Guttag. “Lounges are workplaces. Social meetings are technical discussions. That’s why we wanted a lot of gathering spaces. Though it’s hard to measure, this is what we think is efficient.”

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