Stata was visually fantastic - great light, most places you'd look were interesting and nice to look at.
Acoustically it was bad -- the echoes in the open plan areas were terrible. Too many big, hard surfaces that reflected sounds everywhere.
It leaked and tried to kill people with shedding ice. That was a bit of a drawback.
My office would get cooked by reflected light off of the big shiny silver thing (being grumpy twenty somethings, we called it the Gehry crack pipe). They finally added more HVAC vents to my office right before I left, so that's probably fixed. Of course, it took me adding an extra resistor to the thermistor in the wall temperature sensor to finally get them to address the problem. That didn't go over too well.
I've seen many other CS buildings that are about 90% as visually interesting as the Stata center with 20% of its drawbacks, so my primary conclusion is that they let Gehry have just a smidgeon too much free rein and didn't listen enough to the contractors and engineers.
But it's the most visually impressive building I've worked in, inside and out.
I had a GF who worked for an HVAC sub on Stata and she said it was a nightmare to work on as they were pretty much working off a model rather than prints.
I don't necessarily buy the fetishism of Building 20 (old "temporary" WW2 era structure--for everyone) whose footprint was largely replaced by Stata which, for a lot of reasons, seemed an architectural indulgence. I like Gehry in general. Really liked the Guggenheim in Bilbao which I was at a couple of years ago and it was a really big factor in revitalizing the city. But I'm not sure MIT got a great return from that particular structure.
There are several Gehry buildings that I like from a visual perspective, but I've never worked in them so I always wonder what hidden flaws they harbor. :) The thing I found most annoying about my office getting heated by reflections is that it's the exact same problem he created with the Disney Concert Hall in LA, just on a smaller scale.
Building 20 was kinda old and gross. Good riddance. The Rad Lab deserves its place in history, but just because people did great work in a shack doesn't add much magic to the shack. I really liked my office in NE43 (tech square) and it holds really good emotions and memories for me, but that doesn't take away that it was an ugly building. :)
> My office would get cooked by reflected light off of the big shiny silver thing
I knew someone in a Biology lab across from that. The light was blinding at times, and they had to cover the windows.
I later worked in Stata, but experienced mostly only minor quirks of architecture. And there were some good architectural elements too: the healthy and popular "main street" rather than sterile lobby, some of the common spaces where people would linger and impromptu encounter, the plywood fixtures (I suppose a nod to the malleable "plywood palace" Building 20 previously on the site).
Acoustically it was bad -- the echoes in the open plan areas were terrible. Too many big, hard surfaces that reflected sounds everywhere.
It leaked and tried to kill people with shedding ice. That was a bit of a drawback.
My office would get cooked by reflected light off of the big shiny silver thing (being grumpy twenty somethings, we called it the Gehry crack pipe). They finally added more HVAC vents to my office right before I left, so that's probably fixed. Of course, it took me adding an extra resistor to the thermistor in the wall temperature sensor to finally get them to address the problem. That didn't go over too well.
I've seen many other CS buildings that are about 90% as visually interesting as the Stata center with 20% of its drawbacks, so my primary conclusion is that they let Gehry have just a smidgeon too much free rein and didn't listen enough to the contractors and engineers.
But it's the most visually impressive building I've worked in, inside and out.