Does Gehry's Stata Center Really Work?

(page 2 of 3)

Story Tools

• post a comment
• e-mail this story
• print this story
• order a reprint
• digg this
• save to del.icio.us

A neighborhood is a cluster of private offices opening off a shared space that one staffer calls a “town green.” Usually the shared space is two stories high and often it’s skylit, so the neighbor connections work both horizontally and vertically.

Research at Stata is group focused, and the groups come in many sizes. There are, therefore, many possible orders of magnitude. You can define your research zone as a whole floor, or as two or three neighborhoods, or as just one neighborhood, or maybe as just your own office and a share of its town green. This is what makes Stata fractal, the way it breaks down in steps from large clusters to small, each one of which, at every scale, can be thought of as a centered whole.

“You can’t do that in a linear building, with rooms off a corridor,” says one person. Another sees the plan as metaphor: “For a lot of the deep issues in computer science here, linear analysis doesn’t work.”

Fractals are the Stata. No two places are exactly the same: “The lack of repetition animates the building.” Coffee and whiteboards seem to be everywhere, and people casually join discussions as they navigate their way through the plan: “You run into people you might not have seen in years. I get lost all the time.”

A voice of mild disagreement is that of Noam Chomsky, the linguist and political activist who is the Stata’s best-known inhabitant. Chomsky’s world isn’t fractal. It’s a conventional suite of offices. He says he never meets anyone by accident. He complains about his sloping wall, which means he can’t put bookshelves on it and can’t reach the sunshade in its window. He misses the squirrels that used to run around inside the walls of his old office. He says of the Stata, “I’m fine with it.” But he works mostly at home.

The Student Street is a great architectural space. It’s an indoor walkway that meanders through the Stata’s ground floor. It’s endlessly varied. Sometimes it’s narrow, sometimes wide, sometimes high, sometimes low. Sunlight falls from high windows. Walls angle in and out, often in bright colors.

The Street is like the high street in a British village. Everything seems to connect with it. In the morning, professors climb stairs from the underground garage, stop for a cappuccino, then stride the Street to their elevators (the Street, wisely, is the sole pedestrian way out of the garage). At five o’clock, tots pile out of the day-care center to meet their parents. Undergrads in gym shorts head for the health club and pool. Classes spill regularly from lecture halls and classrooms. Student advocates push petitions or memberships. Visitors stare at the life-size porcelain cow, enthroned atop a coffee shop, that MIT student hackers once, um, liberated from a suburban steakhouse. “There’s a random collection of tables where students flop and study. It’s also a place to promenade.” Students can plug in their laptops almost anywhere on the Street. “It’s full of nooks and crannies where people stop and talk.” The Street is a deliberate reinvention of MIT’s famed “Infinite Corridor,” the drab heart of the old campus. The Street is far better. And like any good public space, it’s open day and night.

The building will never be finished. Says Gehry: “I’m happy when the building is forgiving enough so you can do things to it without destroying it. Put a new light where you want, knock out a wall.” Says a Stata linguist: “Any kind of scientific work is always under construction, always still being built. When you publish a book or a paper it’s never finished, it’s just a step on the way to the next one.”

It occurred to Gehry long ago that his buildings looked more interesting while they were under construction than when they were finished. Ever since, he’s sought ways to give buildings that restless sense of something still happening. Nothing about the Stata feels finished. Since it opened, it’s been in a constant state of minor modification, as the researchers fit it to their needs. The architecture is a metaphor for the science: always an open question, always a work in progress.