Gehry piles on the ideas in MIT design

Underneath the sensuous forms, Frank Gehry’s best work always contains a barely repressed ferocity. The architect has made a career by tearing apart accepted conventions and piecing them together again. In the process, he has sought to free architecture from notions of conformity. His designs are never frivolous.

The new Ray and Maria Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lacks such fury. A jumble of aesthetic forms, it is one of Gehry’s biggest and most whimsical projects to date. It is also his messiest.

The 420,000-square-foot center brings together a number of university departments -- computer sciences, artificial intelligence, linguistics and philosophy -- in a single, sprawling complex. Reflecting that diversity, Gehry breaks the structure down into clusters of mid-sized office towers that interlock around a series of public spaces. The buildings’ forms jostle against each other, creating some wonderful architectural moments. But Gehry keeps piling them on. The sparks fly, but the end result seems forced, more a caricature of urban complexity than a textured architectural experience.

Located at the edge of the MIT campus on Vassar Street, the center rises amid a sea of red, beige and brown brick structures built mostly in the last 20 years. Their intent was to reflect the city’s colonial past. In fact, a generation ago, this was a working-class manufacturing neighborhood. It is now the center of a booming biotechnology research industry.

Rather than challenge this context, Gehry absorbs it into his composition. Seen from Vassar Street, the complex’s exterior has an elegant, even balletic quality. Its alternating brick and steel forms have a musical rhythm, giving the facade an emotional depth that is wholly coherent.

But once one turns the corner, the sense of order fades. The focus of the center’s back facade is the amphitheater, its steps pierced by pine and oak trees to provide shade. Just to the right of the theater is an entry into the complex, a corrugated metal shed with a canted facade and pitched roof. To the left, the complex is framed by the aging form of the faculty pool building.

Climbing the amphitheater stairs, visitors arrive at the complex’s main outdoor plaza, which is anchored by the bean-shaped, mirrored stainless steel form of the robotics lab, a funnel-shaped skylight protruding out of its top. Next to it is a yellow cylinder housing a seminar room. To the right, cascading steel forms mark the entry to the William H. Gates Building, which houses the computer sciences labs. Interspersed among these forms is a series of brick towers, which visually links the composition with the city around it.

The forms pile up, one on top of the other, like packages stacked beneath a Christmas tree. Some, like the Gates Building, evoke the compact intensity of a Cubist composition, as if their disjointed forms were straining to break free of their visual framework.

But what are they straining against? Gehry has often said, rightly, that the forms he designs flow from their immediate context. The layered stainless steel facade of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, for example, was a reflection of the curved exterior of the existing Dorothy Chandler Pavilion across the street. The Chandler’s dull concrete shell has always been considered banal. But as the eye drifts from one facade to the other, one begins to discern moments of unexpected beauty in both.

At the Stata Center, there is no place for the eye to rest. The red brick towers seem to shift and sag, resembling a New England village envisioned by Dr. Seuss. In architectural terms, it is a strategy that comes dangerously close to the distracting visual chaos of themed environments, such as Universal CityWalk or the Grove -- a kind of mall for the mind.

Unlike these shopping centers, which are enclosed worlds, the Stata Center is conceived as a sequence of public spaces that opens up to the surrounding cityscape. What unites them is their aura of artificiality.

This confusion is reflected in the use of materials. The center’s corrugated metal surfaces, which have a wonderfully crude, patched-together look, are reminiscent of Gehry’s own house, which was completed 25 years ago as an aggressive challenge to the smugness of suburban society. By comparison, the vast expanses of brick look remarkably uptight, a nod to Boston’s puritanical roots.

What seems like chaos on the exterior translates into a source of genuine energy inside. At ground level, the Stata Center is arranged along a meandering pedestrian corridor that unites a range of communal activities: cafe, fitness center, theater and child-care facility. Various seating alcoves are set just off this main axis; light filters in windows set between the buildings’ surfaces. Gehry calls this the “student street.” The sense of social compression continues on the upper floors. Two tower clusters -- the Gates Building and the Alexander W. Dreyfous Building -- anchor each end of the complex. Each is organized around a central void. Small conference rooms, which resemble enormous packing crates, are stacked inside the voids. The buildings’ main circulation routes plug in along one side.

The idea is to draw people away from their desktop computers and research labs to create a constant buzz of social interaction. In doing so, Gehry is trying to spark the creative imagination. Even the clutter has meaning: It is meant to replicate the congested rooms of Building 20, the warehouse-like research facility where Noam Chomsky once worked that was torn down to make room for the Stata Center.

This kind of social engineering is familiar territory for Gehry. All of the architect’s designs, to one degree or another, concern themselves with the creative process. And to be in these rooms is to return to the joyful experience of some of Gehry’s best early work. The spaces are taut with energy. The crudeness of the materials -- rough plywood, galvanized steel stud walls, aluminum cable trays, glass -- give them an informality that is liberating.

The problem is that when these spaces are multiplied indefinitely, they risk losing that inner tension. Gehry made his reputation with designs that captured a spirit of social upheaval. They reflected a world in which the bonds that join us together are more elastic, even as they risk becoming increasingly frayed.

But in recent years, as Gehry’s celebrity has grown, so have his commissions. Among the projects he is is working on are a 5-acre arts district in Lisbon and a 7-million-square-foot residential and commercial development anchored by a new sports arena in Brooklyn, N.Y. No longer a creative misfit, Gehry is designing entire urban neighborhoods.

Such projects are forcing him to confront what has long been a central theme of contemporary architecture: how to create increasingly large-scale urban developments while imbuing them with a “human scale” -- a term so overused it has virtually lost its meaning.

In grappling with these bigger projects, Gehry reverts to a strategy whose origins are rooted in the Postmodern movement and have since been picked up by mainstream mall developers. Huge, monolithic developments are broken down into discrete forms; a big building is made to look like a collection of smaller buildings. In a show of respect for historic context, these forms often pick up their stylistic cues from the existing historical context.

The problem with this strategy is that it involves a deception. Rather than reveal conflict, it tends to gloss over it. The mismatch of styles and materials begins to look decorative, and the cumulative effect looks less like an act of social criticism than a capricious architectural fantasy. In Gehry’s case, it can also look like a parody of his own work. This is the problem at Stata. Its social aims are noble, but as an urban composition, it is too safe.