Stata Center
Encyclopedia
Pritzker Prize
The Pritzker Architecture Prize is awarded annually by the Hyatt Foundation to honour "a living architect whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built...
-winning architect Frank Gehry
Frank Gehry
Frank Owen Gehry, is a Canadian American Pritzker Prize-winning architect based in Los Angeles, California.His buildings, including his private residence, have become tourist attractions...
for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
(MIT). The building opened for initial occupancy on March 16, 2004. It sits on the site of MIT's former Building 20
Building 20
Building 20 was a temporary wooden structure hastily erected during World War II on the central campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since it was always regarded as "temporary", it never received a formal name throughout its 55-year existence...
, which housed the historic Radiation Laboratory
Radiation Laboratory
The Radiation Laboratory, commonly called the Rad Lab, was located at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts and functioned from October 1940 until December 31, 1945...
, in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
.
Major funding for the project was provided by Ray Stata
Ray Stata
Ray Stata is a cofounder and Chairman of the Board of Analog Devices, Inc..A native of Pennsylvania, Stata earned BSEE and MSEE degrees from MIT. In 1965 he founded Analog Devices with MIT classmate Matthew Lorber in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Stata was President of the company from 1971 to 1991...
(MIT class of 1957) and Maria Stata. Other major funders include Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. Gates is the former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen...
, Alexander W. Dreyfoos, Jr.
Alexander W. Dreyfoos, Jr.
Alexander W Dreyfoos, Jr. is an American entrepreneur and philanthropist living in West Palm Beach, Florida. After graduating from the MIT Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1954 and Harvard Business School in 1958, he founded Photo Electronics Corporation, a company...
(MIT class of 1954), Charles Thomas "E.B" Pritchard Hintze (a graduate and of JD Edwards,now Oracle) and Morris Chang
Morris Chang
Morris Chang , is the founding Chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd. in 1987. TSMC pioneered the "dedicated silicon foundry" industry and is the largest silicon foundry in the world. Morris is known as the father of Taiwan's chip industry.Chang was born in Ningbo, Zhejiang...
of TSMC
TSMC
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Limited or TSMC is the world's largest dedicated independent semiconductor foundry, with its headquarters and main operations located in the Hsinchu Science Park in Hsinchu, Taiwan.-Overview:...
. Above the fourth floor, the building splits into two distinct structures: the Gates tower and the Dreyfoos tower.
Contained within the building are the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory...
, the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems
MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems
The MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems is an interdisciplinary research laboratory of MIT, working on research in the areas of communications, control, and signal processing combining faculty from the School of Engineering, the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the...
, as well as the Department of Linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
and Philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
. Academic celebrities such as Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
and Ron Rivest
Ron Rivest
Ronald Linn Rivest is a cryptographer. He is the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Computer Science at MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory...
have offices there. World Wide Web Consortium
World Wide Web Consortium
The World Wide Web Consortium is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web .Founded and headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations which maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the...
founder Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, , also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web...
and free software movement
Free software movement
The free software movement is a social and political movement with the goal of ensuring software users' four basic freedoms: the freedom to run their software, to study and change their software, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. The alternative terms "software libre", "open...
founder Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman , often shortened to rms,"'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'"|last= Stallman|first= Richard|date= N.D.|work=Richard Stallman's homepage...
also have offices within.
Several MIT classes, including many taught by the computer science and electrical engineering department (Course VI) are held inside. The Forbes Family Café is also located in the Stata Center, serving coffee and lunch to the public.
In contrast to the trend at MIT of referring to buildings by their numbers rather than their official names, the complex is usually referred to as "Stata", or "the Stata Center". The two towers are often called "G Tower" and "D tower".
Building 20
The Stata Center necessitated the removal of the much-beloved Building 20 in 1998. Building 20 was erected hastily during World War II as a temporary building that housed the historic Radiation Laboratory. Over the course of fifty-five years, its "temporary" nature allowed research groups to have more space, and to make more creative use of that space, than was possible in more respectable buildings (including providing permanent rooms for official Institute clubs and groups, most notably the Tech Model Railroad ClubTech Model Railroad Club
The Tech Model Railroad Club is a student organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and one of the most celebrated model railroad clubs in the world, because of its historic role as a wellspring of hacker culture...
). Professor Jerome Y. Lettvin
Jerome Lettvin
Jerome Ysroael Lettvin was a cognitive scientist and professor Emeritus of Electrical and Bioengineering and Communications Physiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He is best known as the author of the 1959 paper, "What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain", one of the most...
once quipped, "You might regard it as the womb of the Institute. It is kind of messy, but by God it is procreative!"
Critical response
Brushed metal
Brushed metal is metal that has been abraded , usually with a fine grit sandpaper. The brushing gives the metal a distinctive look, as it retains some but not all of its metallic lustre and is given a pattern of very fine lines. It can be compared to metal with several small scratches all running...
aluminum, brightly colored paint, corrugated metal. Everything looks improvised, as if thrown up at the last moment. That's the point. The Stata's appearance is a metaphor for the freedom, daring, and creativity of the research that's supposed to occur inside it." Campbell stated that the cost overruns and delays in completion of the Stata Center are of no more importance than similar problems associated with the building of St. Paul's Cathedral. The 2005 Kaplan/Newsweek guide "How to Get into College," which lists twenty-five universities its editors consider notable in some respect, recognizes MIT as having the "hottest architecture," placing most of its emphasis on the Stata Center.
Though there are many who praise this building, and in fact from the perspective of Gehry's other work it is considered by some as one of his best, there are certainly many who are less enamored of the structure. The use of glass for walls on the inside means that those who work in the building have to give up a sense of privacy. There is also one lecture room where, because of the slight lean of the wall panels, some people have been known to experience vertigo
Vertigo (medical)
Vertigo is a type of dizziness, where there is a feeling of motion when one is stationary. The symptoms are due to a dysfunction of the vestibular system in the inner ear...
. Sound insulation is almost absent. The building has also been criticized as insensitive to the needs of its inhabitants, poorly designed for day-to-day use, and at an official cost $283.5 million, overpriced. Probably one of the more successful aspects of the building is the inner circulation system with niches for impromptu meetings and blackboards along the wall.
Mathematician and architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros
Nikos Salingaros
Nikos A. Salingaros is a mathematician and polymath known for his work on urban theory, architectural theory, complexity theory, and design philosophy. He has been a close collaborator of the architect and computer software pioneer Christopher Alexander, with whom Salingaros shares a harsh...
has harshly criticized the Stata Center:
Former Boston University
Boston University
Boston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...
president John Silber
John Silber
John Robert Silber is an American academician and former candidate for public office. From 1971 to 1996 he was President of Boston University and from 1996 to 2003 Chancellor of the University. Since 2003 he has been its President Emeritus. In 1990, Silber took a leave of absence from the...
said the building "really is a disaster." Architecture critic Robert Campbell praised Gehry for "break[ing] up the monotony of a street of concrete buildings" and being "a building like no other building." The style of the building has been likened to the German Expressionism
German Expressionism
German Expressionism refers to a number of related creative movements beginning in Germany before the First World War that reached a peak in Berlin, during the 1920s...
of the 1920s.
Lawsuit
Skanska
Skanska AB, is a multinational construction and development company based in Sweden, where it also is the largest construction company. The company's head office is in Solna, north of Stockholm.-History:...
USA Building Inc. and NER Construction Management, for "providing deficient design services and drawings" which caused leaks to spring, masonry to crack, mold to grow, drainage to back up, and falling ice and debris to block emergency exits. A Skanska spokesperson said that prior to construction Gehry ignored warnings from Skanska and a consulting company regarding flaws in his design of the amphitheater, and rejected a formal request from Skanska to modify the design.
In an interview, Mr. Gehry, whose firm was paid $15 million for the project, said construction problems were inevitable in the design of complex buildings. "These things are complicated," he said, "and they involved a lot of people, and you never quite know where they went wrong. A building goes together with seven billion pieces of connective tissue. The chances of it getting done ever without something colliding or some misstep are small." "I think the issues are fairly minor," he added. "M.I.T. is after our insurance." Mr. Gehry said value engineering
Value engineering
Value engineering is a systematic method to improve the "value" of goods or products and services by using an examination of function. Value, as defined, is the ratio of function to cost. Value can therefore be increased by either improving the function or reducing the cost...
—the process by which elements of a project are eliminated to cut costs—was largely responsible for the problems. "There are things that were left out of the design," he said. "The client chose not to put certain devices on the roofs, to save money." The lawsuit was reportedly settled in 2010 with most of the issues having been resolved.
Occupants
- Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence LaboratoryMIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence LaboratoryMIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory...
(CSAIL)- World Wide Web ConsortiumWorld Wide Web ConsortiumThe World Wide Web Consortium is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web .Founded and headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations which maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the...
- World Wide Web Consortium
- Laboratory for Information and Decision SystemsMIT Laboratory for Information and Decision SystemsThe MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems is an interdisciplinary research laboratory of MIT, working on research in the areas of communications, control, and signal processing combining faculty from the School of Engineering, the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the...
(LIDS) - Department of LinguisticsLinguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
and PhilosophyPhilosophyPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational... - Childcare Center
- Fitness Center
- Forbes Cafe
- MIT Library cube
External links
- Virtual tour: