Architecture gone wild.(Scan)

As I was standing on a sidewalk in Cambridge, Massachusetts studying a peculiar new building, a man on a bicycle suddenly screeched to a halt, joined me in gazing at the building's odd exterior and exclaimed, "I can't believe this is in proper Boston!"

The man spent long moments staring in amazement at the Ray and Maria Stata Center for Computer, Information, and Intelligence Sciences. As well he should have. What the two of us were taking in--the latest creation of Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry--is so goofy and lopsided, it could be an amusement-park attraction. The Boston Globe's Robert Campbell, an architecture critic not known for overstatement, has described the Stata Center as "a drunken barn dance as it might be represented in a Disney cartoon."

Parts of this building, in which MIT computer scientists will work on the next generation of artificial intelligence, consist of orange brick walls that are a backdrop for other walls shaped into odd angles and silly curves and festooned with windows that pop out like eyes from a frog. Canopies in blue, green, and silvery metal swoop crazily toward the ground.

The bicyclist stared a while longer and then declared, "It looks like it should have a mustache painted on it." Such was one man in-the-street reaction to a building for which MIT paid $3/10 million.

Gehry's buildings, with their unnatural architectural gymnastics, are part of a larger phenomenon today: structures that make a great show of departing from convention. The last time brashness and novelty became a central part of architectural fashion--in the 1960s--all too often the results were oppressive ugliness. Will things turn out better this time?

The Boston area's current experiments suggest not. Just a few blocks west of the Stata Center is Simmons Hall, a ten-story MIT dormitory completed last year. Like Gehry's building, it dispenses with conventional aesthetics and normal budgetary constraints. The 360-person dorm cost $92 million, exceeding earlier estimates by up to $50 million. Designed by New York architect Steven Holl, who disclosed that he was inspired by a bath sponge, Simmons Hall is dotted relentlessly with 5,500 small, deeply set windows, making it impossible to figure out where one floor ends and another begins. The result is a bizarre monolith.

In Boston itself, overlooking the Charles River, stands yet another startling structure--an ...