Stata Center – Eyesore or Boondoggle?

I admit that the first time I saw this building
rising out of a dirt mine in the industrial underbelly of Cambridge,
behind sleazy Central Square and across the tracks from the main MIT
campus I thought I was having an acid flashback.  No such luck.
Now an obligatory stop on the local tour when architects come to visit,
the over-budget and past-deadline project elicits comments as disparate
as "Genuis" and "Demented".

by
Alan Lupo in the Boston Globe

Will Frank Gehry’s wildly over-budget and years-behind-schedule
Stata Center for Computer, Information and Intelligence Sciences at MIT
prove to be a well-intentioned embarrassment? Signs point to yes.

When announced in 1997, the intended completion date was 2000, the announced
budget was $100 million, and Gehry’s swirling, off-kilter polished steel,
glass,
and brick facades still seemed avant-garde. His Guggenheim
Museum Bilbao had just opened
to almost universal, fawning praise. MIT brass now peg the budget at $300
million, although a June press release from a Stata Center supplier put
the cost at $430 million. The completion
date is spring 2004. And what once appeared futuristic now looks like a
jumbly rehash of existing Gehry piles.

The current, faddish Gehry look has become a victim of self-parody, or at
least of parody, to be sure. It is no accident that MIT’s Department of Linguistics,
which is slated to move into Stata, displays the famous Onion
magazine satire
— ”Frank Gehry No Longer Allowed to Make Sandwiches for Grandkids” —
on its website (mit.edu/linguistics/ www/stata/stata.html).