Commentary on this from Stephen Bayley in the Guardian -
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2208851,00.html
Talk about sick buildings
]Frank Gehry is the latest architect to catch a cold
Stephen Bayley
Sunday November 11, 2007
The Observer
Arrogant architects are tolerant of technical failure. Indeed, some regard water intrusion, buckling, settlement and shear cracks as badges of honour. The great Frank Lloyd Wright insisted that if a building did not leak, the design was not pushing the envelope. So it is no surprise to learn last week that the great Frank Gehry's Stata Centre at Massachusetts Institute of Technology is leaking too. So much so that he is next meeting the client in court.
The history of architecture is punctuated by building calamities, some comic, others tragic, mostly just uncomfortable. That famous tower in Pisa leans because Bonanno Pisano's structure was too ambitious for the unstable Tuscan soil. Cathedrals often fell down in the Middle Ages because masons were ignorant of the law of translational equilibrium. They usually blamed it on earthquakes, not incompetence. Ely and Lincoln had such problems, but East Anglia is not a seismically lively area.
The modern period is especially rich in problem architecture, as building technology struggles to keep pace with advanced litigation processes. YRM's Warwick University became infamous when its beautiful white ceramic tile cladding started dropping off on to startled students. James Stirling's landmark History Faculty in Cambridge suffered from violent solar gain. It was only made worse when they cleaned the windows.
In Boston, IM Pei pushed the envelope with the superb Hancock Tower, at 790 feet the tallest building then to be clad with mirror-finish, double-glazed glass panels. The result? A third of them fell off in the first storm of 1973 and they filled the gaps with rescue plywood. Then there was the Millennium Bridge. Norman Foster's design did not anticipate the destructive rhythmic excitations of happy tourists, so it wobbled. The engineers fixed it. And when Paul Andreu's new terminal at Charles de Gaulle airport collapsed in 2004 with fatal results, the architect was said to be ignorant of the cause. Alas, the perpetrators of the World Trade Centre atrocity were tragically assisted by architect Minoru Yamasaki's insistence on ingenious lightweight construction.
But Gehry will be bullish when he has his day in court. Recently, a disgruntled New Yorker had arthouse T-shirts printed with the legend '**** Frank Gehry'. Gehry was delighted and bought a whole consignment. His interpretation of the message was not that it was a sartorial expression of the ultimate labio-fricative insult, rather an invitation to enjoy a romantic dalliance with greatness. Meanwhile, the lights are going out in Cambridge, Massachusetts.