Frank Gehry passed away recently. I had the misfortune to spend some time in one of his monstrosities, the Stata Center at MIT. I always wondered how one washes the windows. Why were the rest rooms hidden away and sized for one each. It was a grossly dysfunctional building.
But if you are one of the left wing types you glorify it. Especially if you never tried to function in one of them. As The New York Review notes:
The great liberator of late-twentieth-century architecture, Gehry was a latter-day Alexander who sliced through the Gordian Knot formed by an exhausted Modernism intertwined with a callow Postmodernism. Instead of trying to untangle those two discordant stylistic visions, which wastefully dominated American architectural discourse during the 1970s and 1980s, he showed an exhilarating way forward with freeform designs that drew on advanced contemporary art as their primary source of inspiration. He made the world safe for oddball buildings, and whatever one might think of the idiosyncratic architecture by the generation who followed him—Santiago Calatrava, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Thom Mayne, and their ilk—their careers would be unthinkable without the precedent he set. Although his dramatic departure from architectural convention was at first confrontational and forbidding, it gradually became more buoyant and embracing. As his clients’ budgets increased and he moved from corrugated metal to shiny titanium, unfinished plywood to polished Douglas fir, and rubber matting to travertine flooring, his architecture lost none of its expressive power and appealed to many who’d found his earlier tough-guy efforts more alienating than audacious. But he was never to everyone’s taste, including Marxist intellectuals averse to an architecture of pleasure, who saw him as an agent of capitalist corporate branding
The buildings just did not work. Why should a great university like MIT have this colossal clump of metal and dirty windows, leaking like a sieve, disconnected from everything else on campus. One missed the old hallways of the original buildings. One had to scurry about hidden hallways in hopes of finding the adjoining location.
Buildings must adhere to their functions. Not the bizarre ideas of some over paid architect.
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