Architecture Gone Wild

The Hartford Courant appears to limit access to subscribers. This article should not be missed so I post it here.

By PHILIP LANGDON (Copyright 2004, Hartford Courant)

July 25, 2004

I was standing on a sidewalk in Cambridge, Mass., studying a peculiar new building on Vassar Street, when a bicyclist suddenly braked to a halt, joined me in gazing at the building's odd exterior and then exclaimed, "I can't believe this is in proper Boston."

Dumbfounded, the man on the bike spent long moments staring in amazement at the Ray and Maria Stata Center for Computer, Information and Intelligence Sciences. As well he should have. What the two of us were taking in - the latest creation of Los Angeles architect Frank O. Gehry - was so goofy-looking, leaning one direction and another, that it could have been in an amusement park. All that was missing was the cotton candy. Even the Boston Globe's Robert Campbell, an architecture critic not known for overstatement, has described the Stata Center as "a drunken barn dance as it might be represented in a Disney cartoon."

Parts of this building, in which MIT's computer scientists will work on the next generation of artificial intelligence, consist of walls of orange brick that line up fairly consistently with the building next door. But the orange brick is basically just a backdrop for other walls shaped into strange angles and silly curves and festooned with windows that pop out like the eyes of a gigantic frog. Canopies in blue, green, and silvery galvanized metal swoop crazily toward the earth.

The cyclist contemplated a while longer and then declared, "It looks like it should have a moustache painted on it!" Such was one man-in-the-street reaction to a building that MIT has paid a fortune - $300 million - to erect.

The arrival of a Gehry building typically is treated as a one-of-a-kind event. In truth, it ought to be understood as part of a larger phenomenon: a push to commission buildings that make a great show of departing from convention. The last time architectural fashion moved so strongly in the direction of brashness and novelty, in the 1960s, the results turned out badly for campuses and for cities. Will things turn out better this time? The Boston area's current experiments suggest not.

On Vassar Street just a few blocks west of the Stata Center is Simmons Hall, a 10-story dormitory that MIT completed last year. Like Gehry's building, it dispenses with conventional aesthetics and normal budgetary constraints. Metropolis magazine reported in May that the 360-person dorm cost $92 million, exceeding earlier estimates by $30 million to $50 million. Designed by New York architect Steven Holl, who reported that he was inspired by a bath sponge, Simmons Hall is covered so relentlessly with small, deeply inset windows (5,500 in all) that it's impossible for a passerby to figure out how many stories high the building is or where one floor ends and another begins. Holl has created a bizarre monolith, the monotony of its grid relieved mainly by enormous free-form or rectangular cut-outs in the facade. Inadvertently Simmons Hall drives home the message that University of New Mexico professor Kim Sorvig broadcast in the June issue of Landscape Architecture: "The demand for nonconformist, landmark buildings distorts design - and designers."

Across the Western Avenue bridge from Cambridge, overlooking the Charles River in the Allston section of Boston, stands yet another startling structure - an apartment building for Harvard graduate students designed by Machado and Silvetti Associates of Boston. Completed last year, the building is an assemblage of dreary elements of 1950s and 1960s dormitory architecture stacked on top of one another or rammed together horizontally. Whether you focus on its five-story base, its 15-story tower or the three-story "bridge" of apartments that connects the two, the building looks deliberately repellent.

Ronald Lee Fleming, president of the Cambridge-based Townscape Institute, says the building - intended as the gateway for Harvard's expansion across the Charles - conveys "a desperate effort to be innovative, as opposed to creating a feeling of tranquility, which people desperately want while driving by on the avenue." New York architect and Harvard graduate John Massengale calls it "the ugliest building at Harvard."

Advocates of such buildings often insist that architecture must be allowed to "take risks," "evolve" and express the realities of a new era. Machado and Silvetti claim that outstanding buildings at Harvard always "represent the newest ideas of their times."

Those arguments are hackneyed. When, in the urban renewal era, Boston took big architectural risks, it ended up building disconcerting projects such as a brutalist City Hall and its oversized plaza - the "newest ideas" circa 1963. The results have been regretted by the public for years. Although it's true that occasionally architecture moves forward in a giant leap, more often it advances incrementally - carefully incorporating innovations into a base of design and construction wisdom that has been refined through decades if not centuries of experience. Traditional buildings, with their usually pleasing proportions, human scale and comfortable public spaces, are the beneficiaries of a long process of separating the wheat from the chaff.

The genius of the Yale campus, for instance, is not "cutting-edge" architecture like Paul Rudolph's Art & Architecture Building, whose interior is grim. The genius of Yale is its Collegiate Gothic buildings organized around enchanting courtyards - the work of James Gamble Rogers, who declined to join the Modern crowd. When constructed from 1917 to the 1930s, Rogers' buildings didn't take their cues from "the newest ideas of their times," which involved a puritanical stripping away of applied ornament. No doubt Rogers recognized that the ideas then gathering force were badly flawed. Instead, he skillfully adapted traditional forms and materials to Yale's and New Haven's conditions, achieving results that continue giving immense pleasure down to the present day. Cities and universities should avoid being stampeded down the voguish path of architectural novelty. As the Modernist pioneer Mies van der Rohe (whose buildings included a famously unlivable glass house in Illinois) once said, "We don't invent a new architecture every Monday morning." You'd think they would understand that in Boston, of all places.