Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Thursday, May 20, 2004

11:05 - Ho for the old days

(top)

Heh. He wants to talk about post-postmodernism? About buildings that don't look so much like "buildings" as "things"? Okay, well, his example is pretty horrendous; no disputing that. But for your edification I present: the Gehry Building at MIT!

Check out this NY Times article. It positively glows. "A toybox at dawn!" "A Disney animation!" "A medieval Italian hill town rising amid the gray rectangular sameness of its section of campus in an industrial part of Cambridge!" And Victor Zue, one of the staff inhabitants, says, "Every week I'm in this building, I feel happier than the week before."

According to my Caltech-grad friends who now live in Boston, though, Zue is just about alone in his sentiment. The students and the faculty loathe this building, which in my friend Erik's words looks, simply, like a "pile". On the inside, it's designed to a bizarre utopian ideal that states that all spaces should be "public" spaces�so as to encourage interaction between people of all stations�and the result is that the people who would normally want private offices and cubicles no longer have any place where they can concentrate. It's always noisy, there's always traffic, and there's no privacy.

Erik also described the architectural scheme as "a combination of communism and Colorforms," and it sure sounds (and looks) that way. (And not just because it went something like 5x over budget, mostly because nobody could figure out how to build all those insane shapes�and because the architect insisted that they be built in place, rather than built on the ground and hoisted up once completed, which naturally stretched the limits of the contractors' sanity. But Stalin would have been proud.) If everybody is the same in the eyes of the State�er, the architect�then nobody needs privacy! Privacy is a tool of the bourgeoisie. All spaces belong to all people. The vision is more important than function. Never mind if masses of students are already drawing up petitions to have this horrible building decommissioned, or at least to have themselves moved to a building a little less deranged.

Caltech's Avery House had the same sort of goal�encourage interaction between undergrads, grad students, faculty, and staff, by building lots of public areas and having them all live in the same sorts of rooms interspersed throughout the building�but whether that idea itself is sound or not, at least Avery looks just like one of the Kaufman-designed South Houses, built in the early 30s. It refers back to the same blueprints, even: stucco arches, red-tile corridor floors, Corinthian pillars, wrought-iron railings and bars, all surrounding a Mediterranean-style courtyard with olive trees and cypresses. It looks like it could have been built on the same contract. (Granted, it was built a lot more cheaply; I didn't know you could even get 1/8-inch drywall.) The functional concept may or may not make sense, but at least the building looks like a building.

It's using that avant-garde "building" motif that's all the rage in some quarters.

I think it may be just about time for people like Gehry to observe the business end of an onrushing cultural backlash.

UPDATE: J Greely sends another example of "progressive architecture" run amok. Sweet merciful crap, I'm beginning to loathe the word progressive...

UPDATE: Keith & Fred send this previous Gehry concoction, which "hangs over the Mississippi, looking like a
derelict car stuck on the bank among the trees".

UPDATE: More thoughts from Sissy Willis, in response to this and Lileks' followup assessment. Yikes�I've never seen a groundswell of crosslinkage like this, around these parts. I guess Gehry wouldn't be too pleased to hear of it.

AFTERTHOUGHT: What do you suppose we'll think of these buildings in, say, twenty or fifty years?