Architect sued for bad design
| Suits involving radical architecture are relatively common, writes Jason SzepIts walls buckle and bulge and its windows pop out from twisting corners with the whimsical air of a cartoon.
But the three-year-old, $300 million building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology just outside of Boston is drawing more scrutiny and provoking more emotion than usual since a lawsuit announced last week by MIT against its celebrated architect Frank Gehry. MIT’s accusations of persistent leaks, drainage problems and mold are nothing new to Ulas Ziyan, a 28-year-old graduate student who has worked in the building since it opened to critical acclaim in 2004. “It seems like every summer they do testing and try to prevent the leaks and every winter it leaks again,” he said. “When it leaks they put these big buckets out and move things around so it doesn’t drip onto the computers.” In an e-mail to Reuters, the 78-year-old Gehry defended his work, for which he was paid $15 million. “I am immensely proud of our firm’s work on the Stata Center,” he said. “I fully stand behind the centre’s design and have no reason to believe that it contributed in any way to the problems, which are relatively minor and easily addressed.” Gehry won architecture’s highest honour, the Pritzker Prize, in 1989, and his best-known work, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, made him one of the world’s most sought-after architects. His current projects span the world, including the large-scale redevelopment of downtown Los Angeles. “Tension between architects and the client is a very usual thing,” said Jay Chatterjee, a professor of architecture and dean emeritus at the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, where he oversaw development of several radically designed university buildings. “It sounds very routine to me.” …More |
