M.I.T. Sues Frank Gehry, Citing Flaws in Center He Designed
By ROBIN POGREBIN and KATIE ZEZIMA
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has sued the architect Frank Gehry and a construction company, claiming that “design and construction failures” in the institute’s $300 million Stata Center resulted in pervasive leaks, cracks and drainage problems that have required costly repairs.
The center, which features angular sections that appear to be falling on top of one another, opened to great acclaim in the spring of 2004. Mr. Gehry once said that it “looks like a party of drunken robots got together to celebrate.”
The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, was filed in Suffolk County Superior Court in Boston last week and first reported yesterday in The Boston Globe. It accuses Mr. Gehry’s firm, Gehry Partners, based in Los Angeles, of negligence and breach of contract in the design of the center, which houses laboratories, classrooms, offices and meeting rooms.
In an interview, Mr. Gehry, whose firm was paid $15 million for the project, said construction problems were inevitable in the design of complex buildings.
“These things are complicated,” he said, “and they involved a lot of people, and you never quite know where they went wrong. A building goes together with seven billion pieces of connective tissue. The chances of it getting done ever without something colliding or some misstep are small.”
“I think the issues are fairly minor,” he added. “M.I.T. is after our insurance.”
Mr. Gehry said he had received several expressions of support from people at the institute. “The professors and the people that we all did the building for are sending me e-mails dumbfounded that their institution is doing this,” he said.
Pamela Dumas Serfes, an M.I.T. spokeswoman, said, “As a matter of policy we don’t comment on pending litigation, and our lawsuit speaks for itself.”
Mr. Gehry has had to address problems with his buildings before. In December 2004, for example, he agreed to sandblast parts of his $274 million Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles in response to a report that found that the building’s skin produced excessive glare.
In the current case, he is joined as a defendant by the Stata Center’s builder, Skanska USA Building Inc., a New Jersey-based subsidiary of a Swedish company, Skanska AB. Jan Saragoni, a spokeswoman for Skanska USA, said, “Skanska values its relationship with M.I.T. and is looking forward to a speedy resolution of the matter.”
But Paul Hewins, executive vice president and area general manager of the company, told The Globe: “This is not a construction issue. Never has been.”
Mr. Hewins said Mr. Gehry had rejected Skanska’s formal request to revise the design for the center’s 350-seat outdoor amphitheater, whose poor drainage has been a large part of the problem.
The suit says that within months of the center’s opening, it essentially started coming apart, with “considerable masonry cracking” in the amphitheater’s seating areas.
In late 2006 and in 2007, M.I.T. hired a designer and a contractor to repair the amphitheater at a cost of more than $1.5 million, the suit says. The institute also discovered additional problems, its court papers say, like “sliding ice and snow from the building’s window boxes and other projecting roof areas, blocking emergency exits and damaging other building elements.”
Mr. Gehry said “value engineering” ― the process by which elements of a project are eliminated to cut costs ― was largely responsible for the problems.
“There are things that were left out of the design,” he said. “The client chose not to put certain devices on the roofs, to save money.”
Yesterday, brownish green mold was visible on the exterior of the Stata Center. Inside, the lobby’s concrete floors were cracked, but no leaking, mold or signs of structural deficiency were evident.
“It is a joy to work in this building,” said Rodney Brooks, a professor of robotics, “and I know that many of its occupants feel the same as I do about it. We asked Frank to give us a building that fostered communication, and he delivered.”