Form follows human function
MIT’s new Stata Center lurches impressively over Vassar Street, a mélange of surfaces and cylinders intersecting at odd angles. Designed by Frank Gehry, it’s seen as the pinnacle of hip, postmodern architecture in Boston (which ain’t saying much), and supposedly is surprisingly functional inside despite its odd form. I therefore feel decidedly square saying it but I must: I think it’s rather ugly. More than anything, its ornamentation seems ostentatious to me, arbitrary, like a sculpture pretending to be a building. Part of me still believes in that mantra of modernist architecture, form follows function. Politically and spiritually, this at least seems like an honest goal, far more than mere irony and whimsy.
