Architecture in Cambridge (1)

I got back from Vancouver with a disposable camera and a few shots left, so I decided to go and take some snaps of the fine architecture of my adopted home town. Now that we have our very own Frank Gehry building, Cambridge is obviously worth a detour for students of modern architecture.

Above and below, the Frank-Gehry designed Stata Center. Cambridge obligingly turned on better weather than Vancouver.

In fact, even before I went off to Vancouver I had been struck by how much modern architecture you can find in Cambridge without covering more than a mile or two. I ran out of film before I was able to do justice even to the few blocks nearest to MIT.



The Stata Center houses, among other things, the office of Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee. It is also home to MIT's Computer Science and AI Laboratory (CSAIL). As I happen to work with a few people at CSAIL, I've heard a couple of good (if perhaps apocryphal) Gehry stories.

Apocryphal Tale 1: Gehry was selected as the architect for the Stata center not long after he became a household name for designing the Guggenheim Bilbao museum. (Picture at right: note the lack of resemblance to a typical university building.)



Hence the MIT faculty who were destined to be housed in his building were justifiably a bit nervous as to what sort of edifice they might end up in. Gehry allegedly walked into a meeting with the faculty and kicked it off by saying "I bet you're all scared sh*tless. But in fact I can design buildings that people work in." I'm told that the building is generally quite a good place to work (but more on that in Apocryphal Tale 2, to appear shortly.)

Another recent contribution to the urban landscape from MIT is Simmons Hall, pictured below rising over the baseball fields of MIT. I've had plenty of chances to see it in different lighting and weather conditions while running around the MIT track. I wasn't sure about it when it first went up but it has really grown on me. I was pleased to learn that the American Institute of Architects agreed that the building warranted an award.