[1562] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
NYTimes.com Article: Frank Gehry Gives M.I.T. Its Newest Experiment
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tao Yue)
Wed May 12 20:35:52 2004
Errors-To: articles-email@ms1.lga2.nytimes.com
Date: Wed, 12 May 2004 20:01:38 -0400
Reply-To: taoyue@MIT.EDU
From: Tao Yue <taoyue@MIT.EDU>
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
The article below from NYTimes.com=20
has been sent to you by taoyue@mit.edu.
Tomorrow's news today.
taoyue@mit.edu
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Frank Gehry Gives M.I.T. Its Newest Experiment
May 13, 2004
By SARA RIMER=20
=20
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 12 - Frank Gehry, the architect, says
his $300 million new computer science and artificial
intelligence building at M.I.T. "looks like a party of
drunken robots got together to celebrate."=20
Charles M. Vest, the institute's president, sees it as "a
toy box at dawn," ready for the kids to play with.=20
Others have likened its jumble of yellow and white
aluminum, polished stainless steel and orange brick towers,
tubes, cubes and cones to a Disney animation, a L=E9ger
painting, fine Bordeaux wine (for its complexity and
variety) or a medieval Italian hill town rising amid the
gray rectangular sameness of its section of campus in an
industrial part of Cambridge.=20
The building, the Ray and Maria Stata Center for Computer,
Information and Intelligence Sciences, embodies the
intellectual daring and innovation - "the joy of
invention," as William J. Mitchell, the architectural
adviser to Mr. Vest, described it - that goes on inside
M.I.T.'s featureless laboratories. Just as Mr. Gehry talks
about his delight in starting new projects without a road
map, so the building, which had its official opening on
Friday, is intended as a metaphor for the questions and
exploration that drive the scientists who occupy it.=20
"Every week I'm in this building, I feel happier than the
week before," said Victor Zue, co-director of the Computer
Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who moved
in at the end of March. He beamed as he stopped to talk
amid the bustle of the two-lane interior "student street,"
the meandering main corridor, with its bright red, blue and
yellow walls. What makes him happy, he said, even more than
the whimsical design, the ultramodern laboratories and the
natural light pouring through the skylights and huge
windows, is that he can retreat to his office for privacy
but then emerge to commune with his fellow geeks on the
student street and in the other abundant communal spaces.=20
The lack of an interior grid - along with the lounges,
kitchens, a fitness center, a cafe and a child care center,
and whiteboards and blackboards seemingly around every bend
- is part of Mr. Gehry's and the institute's plan to spark
creative combustion by encouraging the building's occupants
to bump into one another. Literally.=20
With all due respect to Harvard, its neo-Georgian brick
neighbor to the north, the Stata Center may be one of the
smartest buildings on the planet, not just for its
computer-assisted design, but also for the minds assembled
inside. The line-up includes Tim Berners-Lee, the
Oxford-educated physicist credited with inventing the World
Wide Web; Rodney A. Brooks, the robotics pioneer, director
of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory; Butler W. Lampson, who wrote the first version
of Word; Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics;
and six MacArthur genius award winners, including Erik
Demaine, a 23-year-old computer scientist who won the prize
when he was 22.=20
Who knows what might happen if they all run into one
another as they get lost on their way to the restroom or
the coffee machine? (In Mr. Berners-Lee's department, it's
a $3,100 espresso machine.)=20
The Stata Center is only the biggest complex - 730,000
square feet, including a below-ground parking garage and
outdoor amphitheater - of the university's $1 billion
construction program, which has as one of its primary goals
the creation of a greater sense of community on campus. The
new construction was undertaken as a response to a 1998
student life report that found, among other conclusions,
that as a result of M.I.T.'s lack of "attractive and
convenient space for community interaction," students had
come to regard "computer clusters as social space."=20
Touring the building on May 4, Mr. Gehry recalled his early
meetings with the institute's top administrators. "They
said, `This is a place where some brilliant, brilliant
people hang out,' " he said. " `Some are shy, some are
outgoing. Their tendency is to hide in their offices while
yearning for some kind of interaction.' "=20
Still, even as Mr. Gehry, designer of the Guggenheim Museum
in Bilbao, Spain, and the new Disney hall in Los Angeles,
was inspecting his latest creation, there was grumbling
that maybe a little less interaction was in order.=20
"It's a cool building, but sometimes it's very annoying,"
said Kunal Agrawal, 24, a graduate student in
supercomputing technologies, who was trying to concentrate
at her computer in a large, open space while a couple of
her fellow students were trying to get her attention by
calling her name from the atrium above. "It's too noisy."
She said she hoped she would be one of the lucky people
given an office in the building next year.=20
Ms. Agrawal said that her adviser had given her headphones
to block out the noise, and that she had covered the glass
walls in front of her desk with sheets of paper. This is
the sort of thing Mr. Gehry said he was hoping would
happen: that the occupants would adapt the building to
their needs. He has even supplied movable plywood
partitions.=20
All along, the center, named for Ray Stata, an M.I.T.
alumnus and co-founder of Analog Devices, and his wife,
Maria, was a collaboration between the architect and its
occupants. "I put up my hand and said, `I like opening
windows,' " said Mr. Berners-Lee, who was talking in his
office with the windows open, courtesy of Mr. Gehry.=20
There are already signs that the design is inspiring a
certain playfulness: an inflatable penguin on a pillar, a
beach ball thrown up on a column, reports of the
philosophers' playing Koosh ball in the two-story atriums.
Oversize posters of orangutans were rolling out of a
computer printer two days before the official opening. The
posters were an inside joke, referring to one of Mr.
Gehry's early design inspirations: the habits of
orangutans, who retire to the treetops for privacy but move
down to the ground for socializing.=20
As Mr. Gehry was aware before he even sketched his first
experimental drawings on M.I.T. napkins five years ago (the
napkins are preserved for history in a plastic bag in the
office of Chris Terman, a computer scientist who was the
building's liaison to Mr. Gehry), the Stata Center occupies
historic, even mystical ground. It sits on the site of the
former Building 20, a boxy wooden structure that was thrown
up in 1943 and became known as the Magical Incubator for
the breakthroughs that took place inside, including the
invention of radar and Mr. Chomsky's pioneering work in
linguistics.=20
"This building is on the precise site of one of the major
flourishings of innovation in the 20th century," said
Steven Shapin, a professor of the history of science at
Harvard. "Building 20 was just a shack, completely lacking
in design, ugly, boring. Its magical power was that it
brought out the best from those inside it. And now we have
the direct successor that is the opposite of a nothing
building, designed not only for delight, but for
encouraging innovation. If it has even a fraction of the
effect of Building 20, it will be a roaring success."=20
The beauty of Building 20, Mr. Shapin, Mr. Gehry and
legions of others said, was that it was always intended to
be temporary - although it lasted 55 years - and so its
occupants felt free to knock down walls and doors if they
wanted to run wires or just come into closer contact with
one another. Mr. Gehry said he designed the center in that
spirit.=20
The center, said Jerold S. Kayden, a professor of urban
planning and design at Harvard, is M.I.T.'s way of "turning
itself inside out," and for the first time reflecting
through its architecture the bold experimentation of the
researchers and their work. "This is M.I.T. saying, `No
more plain paper wrapping for science,' " Mr. Kayden said.
" `It's party time.' "=20
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/13/arts/design/13MIT.html?ex=3D1085406498&=
ei=3D1&en=3Da3a157263299d2bc
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