It's just too bad that MIT had to be the poster child for foolishness.

Look at the Stata amphitheater - outdoors, it can never be used during the 'brisk' New England school year. Planted with trees and eaten away at by ice, snow, road salt, rain, it has been repaved almost every summer (when it might actually get some use, but when few students are around to use it). The building it is connected to is an unnavigable disaster, leaky, already dented, with landscaping that is difficult to maintain, already the facade is moldering. Compare this to the sturdy brick factories and mills it was built to imitate... boxes and corridors and caverns which hardly go away when asked.

Robert Heinlein wrote, "Architects copy each other's mistakes, and call it art." I think that function should trump architecture qua architecture every time. Having said that, could Slate please do something about the way it puts advertising on this? It took me three views of the Nationwide Insurance commercial to figure out how to start the slide show.

Well, it really isn't a form/function debate. It isn't that Stata created some great form that communicates to the world and sacrificed some functionality, like comfortable chairs. The communication could have been achieved through means equally expressive; and unless the message really was meant to be the emptiness of the amphitheater in the winter snow, the rapid decay of this current age, or something like that, I don't think the message was faithfully transmitted. It seems that the message was something about openness and invitation and welcome, but instead it was so poorly executed that it became a parody of itself.

I have no issue with his message - trying to communicate something about the Institute and East Cambridge, a jumble of abandoned heavy industry - but with the fact that he did it so poorly, with real ignorance of context (cold winters, harsh weather) rather than the explicitly expressed respect for it.

I think one of the worst examples (or best in this case) is the Denver Art Museum. When it was introduced, everyone thought that the new wing of the museum was going to inspire suddenly hordes of new fans of art. Instead, once the novelty wore off, the museum had to lay off staff since the revenues never materialized and they have a huge increase in costs as a result of this building. Seriously, no one in Denver cares about this building. The building is essentially surrounded by other buildings now, so it is not as if you can even see the building if you are not directly in front of it (as opposed to having built the museum in the middle of an open park, where one could view it from all sorts of vantage points. It is a sad mistake that started with Bilboa and hopefully will finally end with Denver and MIT (although - Paul Allen I bet is a bit disappointed with the Experience museum in seattle as well.

The worst part is, after a few years, these buildings will look dated, old, and still be costing some of these institutions either interest costs (if they borrowed to finance these structures) or opportunity costs (such as spending more on the art inside..hello Denver).

When I see the Stata or similarly "iconic" buildings, all I can focus on is how difficult they will be to maintain. When the sealant around the windows or exterior siding panels needs to be repaired, how does the contractor erect any staging? The building surrounded by the reflecting pool: how do you keep the algae down?

When form doesn't follow function, you get art that needs constant attention. Falling Water is spectacular as art, but as a home, a failure because it needed millions for repairs, while my 200 year house, designed and built by some nameless farmer, still works fine.

Well, it really isn't a form/function debate. It isn't that Stata created some great form that communicates to the world and sacrificed some functionality, like comfortable chairs. The communication could have been achieved through means equally expressive...

I have no issue with his message - trying to communicate something about the Institute and East Cambridge, a jumble of abandoned heavy industry - but with the fact that he did it so poorly, with real ignorance of context (cold winters, harsh weather) rather than the explicitly expressed respect for it.

I agree, BenK, that the debate shouldn't merely be about form vs function. There are some iconic buildings that are more about form than function that work very well. I would hate to have all new public buildings be as strictly utilitarian-looking as the ones in Witold's article. It's interesting that Chicago, which prides itself on its daring architecture, made the choice it did for the Washington Library.

Granted, music halls and museums have special needs that must be considered, but if done right, iconic buildings can be a huge drawing card for cities.

Mary Ann

One small caveat to add to this string:

People visit cities to see the museums. That didn't start with Bilabao. Culture critics like trends nd museum administrators are not terribly imaginative. So after Tut we had a long siege of traviling wannabe blockbusters, all featuring the gold of this or that.

Sexy new buildings and blockbuster shows cn be leveraged to build up membership and add a spark to the rest of your development program. BUT most of those people were coming anyway. Directors of zoos, aquaria and art museums like to spend money on big new attractions and the claim is always that it's what brings in the rubes. I have never seen any kind of report that established a statistical relationship between sexy architecture and either visitor or membership levels. Inevitably, when they're trying to sell the board on the new building, management will talk about "leveraging" and "synergy." Or at least they used to. lately, leveraging and synergy are out of style.

I have no doubt that part of what brings visitors to Bilboa's museum is the building itself. It is also hardly a surprise that reasonable people will doubt that the building is full of great art if the building itself isn't great art.

Looking at classic museums, such as the MFA, the Louvre, the Met, we see ornate, classically balanced architecture; inside, there are paintings and murals, carvings and statues, quite independent of the actual displays. They celebrate 'beauty' or 'the muses' and speak directly to what the visitor is to expect of the art itself. Similar architecture speaks to 'knowledge' at the Boston public library, the NY public library main branch, the Widener library, etc. In times past, the balance of the architecture itself was supposed to be a tribute to the good and sound judgment of a bank or a courthouse; both of which would be adorned with decor speaking to wealth or justice, perhaps both at each location.

In short, there is nothing new in the building for such an institution being considered a piece of art itself; and so, modern art gets 'modern' buildings. It is no surprise that post-modernity demands a similar venue; and that people are supposed to base their expectations of the contents on the container.

The problem, to my mind, is that there is a great confusion about how to do all this on a budget... what to sacrifice, what to keep, and so on. When a budget is made, maintenance seems to be left out - and things that contribute to reducing maintenance costs are also left out. Further, the virtues of postmodernity are most often seen in the disposable, the malleable, while those of modernity are usually seen in the industrially bleak and unadorned - but traditional virtues require high labor costs and good materials and are thus more difficult to construct.

This leads to them being difficult to get past the board with the budget and the bean counters. Nobody thinks that they can put a wing on the MFA that actually uses the original marble construction of the MFA, that matches it in quality and substance - forget carvings and paintings. So naturally, the new sections are built in different style. It gets worse when that style itself proves expensive so that the quality of the construction is cut at key points. This is where you get products like the Stata center, which is much more cheaply constructed than the Great Dome, but even more cheaply constructed than would have been originally intended.

Now there's a lawsuit! MIT vs Gehry

leaks to spring, masonry to crack, mold to grow, and drainage to back up...