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Architect sued for bad design
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Suits involving radical architecture are relatively common, writes Jason Szep
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Its 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 architec
t 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.”
Mold, leaks, falling ice
The 400,000-square-foot Ray and Maria Stata Center’s twisted, arched and jagged surfaces stand out amid the nondescript labs and classrooms that prevail at MIT, which was once a major World War II military research hub and has produced 64 Nobel Prize winners.
The negligence suit says masonry in an outdoor amphitheatre cracked, snow and ice slid off roofs and protruding windows to block emergency exits and damage parts of the building, while mold grew and leaks persisted.
MIT paid more than $1.5 million to hire another firm to rebuild the amphitheatre, according to the suit, which accused both Gehry Partners and construction company Skanska USA Building Inc of violating their contracts with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Jan Saragoni, a spokeswoman for Skanska USA, said the company hoped the case would be resolved quickly.
MIT declined to comment. “Our lawsuit speaks for itself,” a spokeswoman said. Suits involving radical architecture are relatively common, architects and lawyers say.
Celebrated architect Cesar Pelli, designer of some of the world’s tallest buildings, was sued in August by California’s Orange County Performing Arts Center for alleged cost overruns and design flaws in the cutting-edge performance space.
Lawsuit
Rafael Vinoly, who designed the landmark Tokyo International Forum, settled a lawsuit last year with the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority for $24 million in a case that involved drainage problems in the sleek building.
“It is not uncommon that architects are so concerned with design that they seem not as interested in whether the building will leak or hold up or what the engineering considerations are,” said Boston University law professor Nancy Moore.
Standing in front of the Stata, MIT engineering student Brad Simpson marvelled at its design.
“Even when it’s raining really hard there always seems to be natural light inside,” he said. “It’s really a fun building to be in.” — Reuters
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