I like architecture. I like it a lot. And while I may be overly partial to European churches of the Romanesque and Gothic periods, I also really love American architecture. The Boston area isn't exactly a crappy place to live if you're similarly inclined - not just because we have the Charles Bulfinch stylings on Beacon Hill and the South End's Victorian Brownstones (although that's part of it), but also because we have delightful, whimsical, and apparently wholly problematic Strata Center at MIT.
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Plenty has been written about the disaster area that this building has become - it leaks, it molds, you can't get out the emergency exits, there's a lawsuit, Frank Gehry's firm was paid $15 million, you get the picture. A lot of people really hate the building, a lot of people really hate the notion that creative 'genius' (I don't like the term) has ruined, or significantly corrupted, what is, at it's core, a functional art.
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Me? I like federal rowhouses, I like churches with soaring steeples and ridiculous ornamentation and I really, really dig the Strata Center. Shock! It's so modern! It's so tippy and angular! The horror! Whatever. It's silly. It's loud. It might have a completely nonsensical interior. And it's fun. Bottom line - this building is just really fucking fun, and bless you, Frank Gehry, not for your crappy Tiffany's collection, and not so much for the Disney Concert Hall in LA, because that building creeps me out, but thank you for injecting a badly needed shot of whimsy into this buttoned up, stodgy, last-call-at-one-and-there-are-laws-against-happy-hour-young-lady town.
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Remember fun? Remember random doodles and coloring books and cartoons and juice boxes and Leggos that you accidentally left on the woodstove so they sort of melted a little but still work perfectly well? That's what this building reminds me of. On a much grander scale, obviously. But listen - right now, we're this deeply divided country embroiled in a tragically misguided war, actively flirting with what could be a really, really shitty economic downturn, and maybe what we need in the midst of all this might be a building that looks like it was plucked off the block of a Seussian neighborhood and plopped onto the nerdiest campus in America.
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Who cares if it's structurally sound? Let it be irrational. It's Dr. Seuss, it's Rahl Dahl, it's a fairy tale - albeit an edgy one for so-called grown-ups (although, read any Dr. Seuss again, that shit is crazy political.). Let us be juvenile, let this building function as a children's story, a dream-like belief that the world can be something very different than it is right now.
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Some people agree with me, entire books have been written by those who explicitly do not, who cares. It's excessive, it's ostentatious, but in the end, is it that far from what people initially thought (or would have initially thought, if they had time between milking cows and tending goats and making bread and otherwise supporting feudalism to think about contemporary architecture) about Amiens Cathedral? It had structural problems...and it took 16 years to mostly finish. No, the Strata Center is no Amiens, and they come from completely different contexts and serve totally different purposes...all I'm saying is - leave the geniuses alone. Let them make you happy.
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Well played, Frank.
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