More Second-Guessing on Gehry

U. of Toledo’s Center for the Visual Arts (Photo by Kazuya Katagiri)

Now that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has filed its lawsuit against Frank Gehry, other institutions that hired the world-famous architect are bound to encounter some retrospective skepticism and criticism. The Blade, in Toledo, takes a second look at a 15-year-old Gehry building at the University of Toledo.

The university’s Center for the Visual Arts is a 50,000-square-foot structure, clad in lead-coated copper plates. The occupants generally like the building and say that it works well, The Blade reports. And get this: It came in under budget.

The problem is that it’s too small. The building was originally supposed to be 80,000 square feet. The reporter, J.C. Reindl, asked whether the university should have hired a less prominent architect and gotten a bigger building. University officials dismissed the question.

The Blade reports that a Phase II design for the art center, drawn up by Gehry years ago, still exists. But the university, which had hired Gehry months before he won the Pritzker Prize and years before his most prominent projects, now seems unlikely to attract him back to finish the work, the story says.