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January 21, 2008, 12:39 PM ET
A Construction Sleuth Visits MIT's Stata Center and Sees Industrywide Flaws
Fast Company took an engineer who sometimes serves as an expert witness in court cases to visit the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s notorious Frank Gehry building, the Stata Center (right) — which as you doubtless remember is the subject of a lawsuit in which MIT accuses Mr. Gehry of “providing deficient design services and drawings.”
The engineer, Joseph Lstiburek, is “the Sherlock Holmes of construction,” according to Anya Kamenetz, the Fast Company writer. What Mr. Lstiburek deduces — after pointing out flaw upon flaw — is that the fault lies not in Mr. Gehry’s over-the-top design, which features wild angles and billowing metalwork, but in poorly chosen construction materials and techniques.
In other words, lousy specs.
Mr. Lstiburek says that both Mr. Gehry’s firm and the contractor, Skanska U.S.A., should have done their jobs more competently. The Stata Center’s leaks and mold growths, he says, result from fundamental errors of craft that affect up to 20 percent of new buildings. “It’s hard for people to believe that something so simple is screwing up these buildings,” he says. “But this is an industrywide problem. It’s not because you have a famous architect.”
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