M.I.T.'s Stata Center :: Jay Splaine

As a longtime resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts, I have many opportunities to enjoy beautiful architecture. But where I work, in the city’s Kendall/M.I.T. vicinity, the sci-tech hub of the East, I have few.

I have successfully tracked the few local buildings that represent the best in past and current styles. But ugly, lazy architecture abounds in the Boston-Cambridge area. Why so many rectilinear ogres donning wrap-around windows, for instance? See-through is, well, transparent. Perhaps unfairly, I charge as obtuse most of the U.S.-consigned architects who try to break out of the styles that defined the first 70 percent of our nation's history. It’s as if they designed in a vacuum, oblivious to the facts that in the real world concrete weeps, birds poop, wind will take that giant mirror glued to a building and slam it on some poor car parked in Copley Square. Issues of aesthetic transition are ignored or done poorly, as demonstrated by Graham Gund's church-turned-condominium complex, and Philip Johnson's addition to the Boston Public Library.

All of this leads to a larger question: If we can't get the buildings right, how will we manage the environs?

Here in the Northeast, the term landscape architecture is synonymous with the work of Frederick Law Olmsted: Boston's Emerald Necklace; New York City’s Central Park, Hartford's Bushnell Park, Montreal's Mount Royal Park. As the founder of American Landscape Architecture, Olmsted was a man who handled the environs with class. In the Boston area, landscape architects abound, yet too many are shunted to the tasks of parking-lot and sidewalk design.

The field Olmsted created was one of precise engineering and principled horticulture; today, the L.A.s' forte is the former and the designers' is the latter (with exceptions). An example of this professional conflict can be found in the rivalry between Harvard's program for Landscape Design and its Graduate School of Design program for Landscape Architecture. But that would require a separate essay.

As American office parks rearticulate our Manifest Destiny and redefine the idea of "natural surroundings," the need for innovation, skill, and taste is negligible, especially in the face of cost effectiveness.

But in Cambridge, there is an example of this graceless trend reversed, of a heartening attempt at marrying landscape and architecture. It is found in the space surrounding and linking the various appendages of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Ray and Maria Stata Center for Computer, Information, and Intelligence Sciences.

To consider the space is to first consider the structure. Insert this name for the Stata Center: Frank Gehry.

		Jay Splaine

In 2004, Frank Gehry brought his brand of blob architecture to my weekday neighborhood, forever changing the y-coordinate for all future projects here when he designed the Stata Center.

Best imitated in an episode of The Simpsons and perhaps best recognized for creating Spain's Guggenheim Museum (1997), Gehry's aesthetic seems to be the logical transition from the International Style: mechanical yet organic, angular and soft, slickly futuristic and selectively textural. He has enjoyed at least two sites that perfectly agree with his vision: Bilbao, experiencing general post-industrial renewal, and here at M.I.T., which continues to experience a high-tech explosion.

In spite of the engineering and fiscal issues that came to light around the time of last year's official opening, it is hard not to be grateful for Gehry's appointment. His attention to form cannot be called lazy. He deliberately paid homage to the brick warehouses that ruled Cambridge decades ago, employing the more orange-yellow hue of this construction staple. His palette was metallic and Southwestern, suggesting everyman's land of the future and no-man's land of the desert.

His shapes cascade, topple, reach out to denizens. He mixed the look of enamel with titanium, glass, and fired clay. His surfaces became matte, glossy, corrugated, and porous. Gehry challenged all of the disposable, incongruous, see-through buildings with "industrial" metallic awnings cluttering the area.

The building alone redefines the landscape; it actually gives the area landscape, especially since the old pine trees lining the nearby railroad have all but disappeared. Gehry’s Stata Center impresses partly because the landscape does, too, and if we consider the actual landscape shapers, there is much to ponder.

My appreciation of the Stata Center's surroundings came gradually. Like much of my now-favorite music, art, and architecture, I took them for granted at first, and for too long. How many times did I cut down Vassar Street (flanking the building on the north) before I noticed the sidewalk's roomy expanse and self-contained bicycle path? How often did I cross Main Street, eyes fixed upon the bio-morphic and trapezoidal shapes of the center’s "Gates" area, completely ignoring the choreographed flora at my feet? The message I ultimately received from this landscape design team was stunning.

When I first learned that Laurie Olin and his Olin Partnership (Keith McPeters, Yue Li, and Annie Griffenburg) were chiefly responsible for the landscape architecture surrounding the Stata Center, I visited their Web site and could not reconcile the seemingly generic visual curriculum vitae with the subtle masterpiece they had completed across the way. Regardless, they came through, and their project partners, Judith Nitsch Engineering, just won an award for the design of the center's storm water management system, which incorporates man-made wetlands to collect and treat runoff for consequent use with toilets and other apparatuses.

Before I knew that this recycling technique, called bio-mimicry,* existed, I first grew to appreciate the Gates' plot of land. Here reside three asymmetrically situated mounds, topped with pine and white birch trees and footed by scattered fern, low-growing shrubs, smooth-leafed plants, and a variety of maple. The look is not manicured but not unkempt.

The idea to raise the landscape in certain areas is an important one; it allows the observer to slowly work their way up to the enormous, seemingly alive cartoon building that it encircles. It also mitigates some of the weighty expression of the building by destroying the sea-level feel of the street. Finally, it defines the Stata Center as its own space, but uses a tapering effect to soften the statement. This concept is continued and equally successful along Vassar Street, although implemented differently.

The pedestrian or driver is physically much closer to the center when they pass along Vassar Street, a popular path that leads west to the divisive Massachusetts Avenue and many more M.I.T. buildings. There is not a lot of room for buffer between the masterpiece and the footpath. One solution broadened the foot/bicycle path (rescuing cyclists from future "dooring" incidents) and employed tiles to line the sidewalk. The other implemented ramps for buttressing landscaping. The magnitude of Gehry's work is thus transitioned to you by about a 35° angle, instead of a blunt 90° one.

Kara Tutunjian

The vegetation that "walls" part of this street is the perfect complement to the building and front plaza: a smattering of straw-like grasses, punctuated by claret desert-like flowers, give the north side its own arid-climate personality and are a nice respite from the ubiquitous, neon impatiens and gaudy flora imported by other businesses. Together with the site's other plantings, the Olin Partnership has hit upon a plan that well-suits the adobe/Sleeper sensibilities of its centerpiece.

Along the perimeter of the front plaza stand matte metallic, halogen-desk-lamp streetlights, which continue around the corner, along Vassar Street. The lights found closer to the mounds are cousins to their sidewalk-mates; they are made of similar materials but use angled flat panels aimed at various point of the building's facade. The look of these lamps reinforces the high-tech statement made by the Stata Center and its neighbors, the older—but innovative in its own right—Whitehead Institute and the newer M.I.T. construct for Brain and Cognitive Sciences. The aesthetic unifies a significant corner, which, along with its newly tiled sidewalks, somehow maintains Cambridge’s warehouse-district feel and shuns the clamped arms of an office development.

The east and south sides of the Center do not deal as directly with streets as with pedestrian ways and connective open spaces to other campus structures. M.I.T. buildings have names, but more important for many are their numbers, as the campus's side streets are a maze.

As you make your way east, you follow a landscape similar to the one that marked the front. It trails off and up confronted by a brick amphitheater that rises to a walkway and garden in the back where Gehry's materials and forms converge. The logical and random qualities of this graduated space are equally compelling. The steps provide a much-needed alternative to the miscellaneous plots of campus grass that provide seats for students and business folk who have just visited the best meal trucks around.

The space curls in a half-shell, allowing participants to feel included and open to exploring the adjacent grounds. This is a semi-sheltered "thinking-spot," but also a display of what the thinker is missing. The randomness is led in by the winding landscape below, carried on by the same above, and connected by juxtaposed trees on the steps of the theatre. If you don't want to be next to a person, you may sit near a maple or spruce, although the techies take most of the spots.

Such a small decision as adding a few trees to an unlikely area makes the greatest difference in terms of forging a continuous, natural, and creative environment in the urban landscape. When you continue from the half-shell to the street-level back end, opening up to a plaza and a small playground, you appreciate such details even more. The problem of transitioning to another building's space (in this case, the not-so-pretty Compton Laboratories) is not easy, but Olin's choice and placement of vegetation, along with neutral plaza masonry, makes cake of the change.

The change leads to a hidden gem at the backside of the Stata Center: an Erector-set-like footbridge spanning a waterless moat of tiered, "caged" stone, bed-headed grasses, shrubs, and pebbles. The granite boulders and willows guarding the labs' side complete a situation that pleasantly surprises the visitor but also allows them to understand Olin's strategy.

Kara Tutunjian

In a vicinity of constant, rapid construction and gentrification, planning should be thoughtful and thought provoking. When considering a city of historic and aesthetic value, planning should remember the previous structures and environs and how they graced the area with their form, detail, and function.

As my own office building suffers on one side from the jackhammer and wrecking ball (all for the addition of transparent panels); as native trees behind it are felled; and as generic buildings, bridges, and parks evince less of the character of Boston and Cambridge; I am glad that Frank Gehry and Laurie Olin challenged the new status quo with the Stata Center project. Whether their models of blob and bio-mimicry will age with grace is unknown, but at least they invite healthy competition for following endeavors. In a metropolitan area renowned for its world-class thinkers, we could always use more who will expertly lift or even save our collective face.

*according to Olin's Web site, this is a way of reintroducing natural systems such as varied topography and vegetation into the built environment.

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