Dazzling Designs, at a Price

Colleges bank on the publicity and prestige a star architect will bring, but critics see cost overruns, poor planning, and dubious priorities

By SCOTT CARLSON

Dan Seib, sitting in a trailer guarding a construction site at Case Western Reserve University, snatches up a pad of yellow legal paper and bends it into an undulated

ALSO SEE: Colloquy Live: Join a live, online discussion with O. Robert Simha, director of planning emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on the use of big-name architects on college campuses, on Thursday, January 25, at 1 p.m., U.S. Eastern time.

shape. This, he says, is a curtain of stainless steel that will ripple and flow over the lumbering concrete mass sitting just outside his window.

Mr. Seib, the project manager here, explains that every part of the building, including the free-flowing steel, is plotted by and checked against computer models used to design sports cars and jet airplanes more often than buildings.

With these descriptions of precision and scale, Mr. Seib makes an apparent, basic point: Building a structure designed by one of the world's most famous living architects, Frank O. Gehry, is a massive undertaking.

The building, a new home for the university's Weatherhead School of Management, is only a skeleton of steel supports, wood, and cement on this gray November morning. But Mr. Seib, walking through the structure, already sees skylights that will shoot sunbeams down to the basement, faculty offices with 12-foot-high ceilings, classrooms with seats surrounding the speaker in the center, and, of course, cascades of silvery curves, the Gehry trademark.

			Timothy Hursley U. of Minnesota's McNamara Alumni Center, designed by Antoine Predock, raised the ire of some alumni architects.

When it is finished in 2002, the 149,000-square-foot building will cost more than $60-million, and Case Western officials insist it is worth every penny. This rust belt university hopes the glint of Gehry's stainless steel will be a beacon, drawing donors, new students, and professors. Case Western's publicity boasts: "It's NOT an ivory tower."

Though the building is meant to set the university apart from others, many of the institution's peers are using a similar strategy.

Big-name architecture, with mammoth budgets, is no longer something you find only at places with the endowment and history of a Princeton University. For more than a decade, institutions ranging from tiny Skidmore College to the sprawling University of California system have hired "star" or "signature" designers such as Mr. Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Antoine Predock, Robert Venturi, and others to put their idiosyncratic marks on the campus landscapes, and to put the colleges on the map.

Drexel University opened a building by Mr. Graves in 1999 and has plans for two additions, one by I.M. Pei and another by Philip Johnson. A new University of California campus in San Francisco will feature structures by a number of well-known architects, including Cesar Pelli. The Illinois Institute of Technology, known for its Mies van der Rohe collection, got some heat when it recently decided to break the Modernist mold and add a building by the deconstructivist Rem Koolhaas. And Bard College is putting up a $60-million Gehry building after a tussle with preservationists, who said it would mar a historic landscape.

Although many of the new buildings have been acclaimed on aesthetic grounds, some educators question these latest signature buildings. The structures are expensive both to build and to maintain, and administrators are unprepared for the task of guiding, challenging, and controlling star architects.

Andy Snow Michael Graves's Engineering Research Center at the U. of Cincinnati is one of several signature buildings that enliven the campus.

And other critics -- such as Lawrence W. Speck, a professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Austin -- object to the notion of architecture as a publicity ploy or a brand statement.

"I hate the term 'signature architecture,' because I don't think buildings are about their author," Mr. Speck says. Eschewing "designer-label stuff," he adds that truly great architecture should respond to the functional, environmental, and aesthetic demands of the campus, producing something unexpected, even by the architect.

"The whole notion that you just want a flashy signature piece is a very shortsighted and small-minded way of looking at architecture."

Even Mr. Gehry himself, while acknowledging that some institutions hire him for his name, scoffs at the notion of name-brand architecture. "You know, it's all silly, isn't it?" he says wearily in a telephone interview from his studio in California. "For years, good architects weren't used, and all of a sudden they call them 'signature architects,' which is stupid."

In the past decade, Ohio has become something of a hot spot for signature architecture. At Ohio State University there is the famously unconventional Wexner Center for the Arts, one of the first major works by Mr. Eisenman, who won the commission for the $43-million project in a design competition. He was, up until its completion in 1989, mainly known as a theorist. The building -- featuring canted walls and glass sculptures by Maya Lin -- brought international attention to the university and is still recognized for its eccentricities, such as a staircase that leads into a wall. Critics raved about it.

			Daniel Milner Top: The Weatherhead School of Management, designed by Frank O. Gehry, is under construction at Case Western. Bottom: A model of the building, which will be finished next year.

To the southwest, another public institution, the University of Cincinnati, has hired a handful of stars to redesign its campus and erase past architectural sins. In the 1960's and 70's, an era rarely cherished for its architecture, a baby-boom growth spurt led to the poorly planned construction of drab, monolithic concrete structures and parking lots. University officials say that a Hollywood director once wanted to shoot a film set in Bulgaria there.

In the mid-1980's, Jay Chatterjee, the dean of architecture, and Joseph A. Steger, the president, realized that alumni were ashamed of the campus and set out to make it over. They hired George Hargreaves, then an up-and-coming landscape architect (now chairman of the landscape-architecture department at Harvard University), to create a master plan and replace the parking lots with lawns, paths, and fountains. Since then, the university has appointed the likes of Henry N. Cobb of the firm Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, Mr. Gehry, Mr. Graves, David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Mr. Eisenman, matching them with local firms, to design five buildings on the campus's most prominent sites. The entire project has cost about $280-million, $50-million of which came from donations, according to Dale L. McGirr, the vice president of finance. The bulk of the rest came from the state.

Mr. Chatterjee says he advocated for prominent architects from the beginning, but he doesn't care for the "signature" label. "I don't know what that term means. We selected architects on the basis of what they are doing -- architects who push the barrier a little bit." Nevertheless, he knew that added benefits, along with added cost, came with a name-brand architect.

"I always said it was going to cost a little bit more, but whatever that little bit is, it would be impossible to replace that kind of publicity, starting with this building," Mr. Chatterjee says from his office, which sits in Mr. Eisenman's jagged, pink and pastel-blue Aronoff Center for Design and Art, finished in 1996 at $44-million. During its construction and shortly after it was finished, the 164,000-square-foot center was featured in four different articles in The New York Times.

Romain Verley The Wexner Center for the Arts, with few right angles, was designed by Peter Eisenman and completed at Ohio State University in 1989.

"Looking back and doing searches, my graduate students and I couldn't find anything about the University of Cincinnati ever in The New York Times," Mr. Chatterjee says. One of the articles quoted Philip Johnson, the dean of star architects, who said the building "had no equal in American architecture." (All this high art might be lost on the students, however, who call the sherbet-colored structure "the Miami Vice building," according to a university spokesman.)

Officials at Case Western saw the publicity that celebrated architects brought their neighbors and hoped to bring the same attention to Cleveland.

"Frank is a noted architect, and one of the main problems of Case Western Reserve is that it has very little name recognition," says Kim S. Cameron, a former dean of Case's management school who is now a professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He oversaw part of the planning and the groundbreaking of the building.

Case Western was able to get Mr. Gehry through the building's lead donor, Peter B. Lewis, the chief executive officer of Progressive Casualty Insurance and one of the architect's long-time friends. Mr. Lewis pledged to pay 60 percent of the construction bill. Scott S. Cowan, who started the project and had been dean of the management school until Mr. Cameron arrived in 1998, said the university had first planned a $25-million structure. Then Mr. Gehry was brought in, he says, and the university decided to spend $40-million.

When Mr. Cameron inherited stewardship of the building from Mr. Cowan, the business school had raised about $31-million for the project, Mr. Cameron says.

Now the Weatherhead building is expected to cost $61.7-million, and Mr. Cameron is back at the University of Michigan. He says David Auston, the new university president, asked him to leave after ground had been broken. Although Mr. Cameron doesn't know why he was pushed out, he suspects that it might have something to do with the building's inflated budget. (Mr. Auston says Mr. Cameron's departure had nothing to do with the building or its construction costs, but he declines to elaborate.)

Soon after he joined the university, Mr. Cameron says, the contractor and architects met with him and made it clear that the building was going to cost more than $40-million. "So we spent a couple of days whittling down costs and got it down to $48.8-million," Mr. Cameron says. He would have to ask for more money from the Board of Trustees and Mr. Lewis. Mr. Cameron says the architects and general contractor assured him that $48.8-million was as high as the price tag would go.

			Lisa Ventre The Aronoff Center for Design and Art, designed by Peter Eisenman, got the U. of Cincinnati coveted mentions in The New York Times.

Over the next nine months, however, the construction documents went through more revisions, then went out for bids. Very few construction companies answered the call, and those that did came back with figures over $60-million. Mr. Cameron was floored.

"You can imagine what Peter Lewis said," Mr. Cameron says. "He hit the ceiling." Nevertheless, Mr. Lewis has stuck to his pledge.

High demand for construction companies in Cleveland -- complicated by the unconventional elements of the building's design -- also contributed to the hefty price tag. "Everyone expected people to line up to build a Frank Gehry building," Mr. Cameron says. "Instead, we got comments like the one we got from a steel contractor, who said, 'Look, we can build a bunch of square boxes and earn the same $20-million that it will cost to build your building. But we can do those in six months, and it will take two years to do your building.'"

Faculty members nevertheless are excited about the design, but at the same time, some have reservations. One, who wishes to remain anonymous, worries about the lost opportunities for financing scholarships or endowed chairs when the development office is raising funds for buildings instead of other projects.

O. Robert Simha, who was the director of campus planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1960 until last year, observes the signature-architecture trend with wry amusement. "This business of star architects is not new," he says.

"Popes did it, kings did it, the Medicis did it, and now university presidents do it."

And have been for some time: H.H. Richardson built his stone and brick structures at Harvard University around 1880, Paul Philippe Cret worked on the University of Texas at Austin campus in the 1930's, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed buildings for the Illinois Institute of Technology in the 1950's.

But these days, universities have been urgently "caught up in the notion that unless you engage these types of people, you won't be fashionable," Mr. Simha says. M.I.T. itself has signed Mr. Gehry for a $100-million computer-science laboratory, now under way.

"The impact of the media should not be underestimated," he adds. "All you have to do is pick up The New York Times and see Bilbao or Rem Koolhaas, and you can just see the trustees, many of whom are people in the business community, asking the president of the institution they might serve: 'Why aren't we using these guys? They'll give us a lot of publicity.'"

Unfortunately, he says, university presidents and administrators are often unprepared to deal with star architects. "Some schools of education have training sessions for new university presidents, but they never include the selection of architects as part of their curriculum," he says, adding that whether and how to construct new buildings are among the most important decisions presidents make. When building costs rise or when the building doesn't live up to expectations, the tendency among administrators "will be to blame the architect and not to look to themselves to give the project discipline."

"It's not a one-way street," Mr. Simha says. "If you've hired a strong designer, you need to have the same kind of strength on the other side."

A university needs to set up informed administrative offices, including university architects and planners, that can authoritatively control the project's budget and design, see where the building fits aesthetically on a campus, and know when to say "no" to an architect's idea. Mr. Simha adds that great architects work best with institutions that can clearly state their goals.

Too often, administrators get "caught up in the romance" of a star project, he says. "No one wants to feel like they're a philistine and turning off the art. But the reality is, the meter is running all the time."

What's more, design and construction are merely the first stage of what should be a building's long life. Richard P. Dober, a Boston-based campus planner and author of a seminal work on the subject, says that some signature projects emphasize the star quality of their designs at the expense of the overall campus plan.

And sometimes more resources are poured into the buildings' attention-grabbing designs -- unusual materials or intricate detailing, for example -- while short shrift is given to the buildings' mechanical elements, such as ventilation systems, Mr. Dober says.

"I've been in some signature buildings where the overall visual effect is very good, but then I'll sit in the library and listen to the gurgling of the inadequate mechanical system," he says. "I prefer not to say which one, but I don't think that it's an uncommon problem." Because some signature buildings underwent such compromises during construction -- and because some incorporate materials that are visually striking but not durable or easy to clean -- their annual maintenance expenses can be higher -- as much as $5 per square foot, compared with $3 in more traditional buildings, Mr. Dober estimates. Also, because of their expansive atria, some signature buildings can be energy hogs, difficult and costly to heat or cool.

"I don't think there is anything wrong with a signature building. I think they have a purpose," Mr. Dober says, adding that Columbia University's new $85-million student center, designed by the Swiss-born architect Bernard Tschumi, has a compelling, well-organized design and seems well built.

"I tend to be an optimist," Mr. Dober says. "I don't want to think of these as the tombs of the pharaohs -- magnificent places in which all values and all personalities have been buried. But sometimes I feel that way."

Maintenance budgets and the longevity of buildings, both structurally and aesthetically, have been confounding planners at the University of California at Irvine, where a series of high-profile buildings were constructed from about the mid-1980's to the early 90's. They include buildings by Robert A.M. Stern and the late James Stirling, as well as ones by Mr. Gehry and the Los Angeles architect Eric Owen Moss that won awards from the American Institute of Architects.

The buildings have been a mixed blessing, says Rebekah G. Gladson, the university's campus architect. While they focused national attention on the campus, there have been some "fairly serious maintenance issues," she says, which have cost Irvine as much as $2-million per building only a few years after completion. "Buildings have to be of a certain age to get maintenance and operation funds [from the state], so then you end up having to scramble to try to figure out where you're going to get the funds to keep this building from leaking. How are you going to replace a roof that's only seven years old?"

Many compromises were made for aesthetics, Ms. Gladson says. Consider Mr. Moss's award-winning structure, built for the university's housing office. James B. Craig, the director of housing, says the building looks great and has brought the university tremendous attention. He's given tours to countless visiting architects. "Only one of them asked how the building has worked for the users," he says.

On that issue, there have been frustrations: Mr. Craig says the building was originally built with floors of concrete, an aesthetic specified by the architect; but the bare floors made so much noise with footfall that the university added carpet. The metal roof, a striking feature, has leaked. Mr. Craig says the heating-and-ventilation system has been a headache -- it can't keep the building at a consistent temperature. And the windows are nonstandard sizes; none have broken yet, but if one does, a replacement will be costly.

Mr. Moss says that most university administration buildings are bland, and meant to be easily customized, but "this is not a building that was designed to be pushed around and modified." At Irvine, the high design demands had to be met at the lowest cost, which might be the root of the problems.

But mechanics are merely one troubling issue. Although the individual buildings brought attention to the campus, they remained stubbornly individual. Ms. Gladson wants to make the campus feel like a cohesive whole. "That becomes a pretty daunting task," she says. "There's no context to how [the signature buildings] fit in, no linkage back to the history of the campus, and no reinforcing major components of circulation or outdoor space. They become very much objects of themselves."

Paul Venable Turner, a professor of architectural history at Stanford University, says campus planners have faced the challenge of creating unity on campuses since the end of World War II, when campuses began abandoning comprehensive master plans and advocated individualistic architectural statements. Paul Rudolph's Art and Architecture Building at Yale University was an early example of the trend, Mr. Turner says in his book Campus: An American Planning Tradition.

Finding the cultural roots for this taste for individualistic architecture is more difficult. Thomas R. Fisher, the dean of architecture at the University of Minnesota and formerly the editor of the now-defunct Progressive Architecture magazine, says that signature architecture ties into universities' fixation on star students and itinerant, star professors. "Increasingly, we don't think of ourselves as communities anymore," he says. "Architecture reflects our values, sometimes more so than we would like. I think these star buildings and star architects are a reflection of a star culture that has taken root in many universities and has tended to work against the idea of a collegial community, the sense of suppressing one's individuality for the good of the group." He points to the typical campus quad as an example of the old ideal: The buildings surrounding the green might not be individually stunning, but they often come together to make a powerful whole, a sense of timelessness on the campus.

The new ideal might convey something else -- a sense of the timely, perhaps. "Even though these institutions will be around hundreds of years from now, there really aren't as many incentives to think over the very long term if you can do something that gives you an advantage now," Mr. Fisher says.

Still, he says, there is no need to blame signature architects. "These people are famous for good reason," he says. "They are incredibly good communicators, incredibly good designers, and -- most of them, most of the time -- bring buildings in on budget, on schedule, and that have happy clients."

Mr. Fisher's own institution has two recent signature pieces, and a third on the way. The Frederick R. Weisman Museum, designed by Mr. Gehry and opened in 1993, overlooks the Mississippi River. The $14-million building was loved and hated by many at first -- one letter to the local newspaper, the Star Tribune, called it "the Pile of Schlitz," comparing it to a stack of beer cans -- but it has brought international attention. On cold, clear evenings, it burns with the setting sun.

Minnesota's just-completed McNamara Alumni Center, designed by Antoine Predock, stands on the other side of the campus. It raised the ire of some alumni architects; the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects wrote a testy letter to the university, complaining that Mr. Predock, who hails from the Southwest, had no business doing an alumni building. Six architects competed for the commission; five were alumni. Those five brought in plans and models. Mr. Predock didn't. Instead he read snatches of poetry, talked about Minnesota culture, and surveyed the state's natural landscapes, a potential inspiration for the project. The alumni committee was charmed by the presentation, says Margaret Carlson, executive director of the alumni organization. The presentation put Mr. Predock's work in language that lay people understood, something architects should do more often, Mr. Fisher says. "It's a sort of Garrison Keillor effect, people sitting around the kitchen table. ... I think that's brilliant.'' Mr. Predock, for his part, says he considers it insulting to impose a design idea before he's talked with the client.

Mr. Simha, from M.I.T., later heard about the pitch and saw some of the materials Mr. Predock had used. "I was in awe," he says. "I had seen a lot of fantastic salesmen, but I thought that was pretty clever."

Mr. Predock's work -- a 230,000-square-foot mass, armored in copper, with a faceted, gemstone-like dome stuck to its front -- was meant to be a "gateway" for students, a $45-million welcome mat, financed by alumni donations, bonds, and rent from office suites in the building. The interior -- with its smooth, granite floors illuminated by skylights slashed across a wood-paneled, polyhedron dome -- holds a grand meeting hall, a congregation area for university events. Its exterior, however, stands stark and imposing on its corner, surrounded by parking lots and streets. Mr. Predock and the alumni association plan to take out the parking lots and replace them with trees, lawns, and a fountain, which they say will soften the building's appearance. The landscape design will cost an additional $3-million.

Like Mr. Predock, Mr. Fisher is doing a bit of salesmanship himself -- to his discriminating faculty members, to novice members on the Board of Regents -- for an architecture-school renovation and addition designed by the New York architect Steven Holl. Mr. Fisher says he has played a delicate role as mediator, conveying the demands of the university while going to bat for Mr. Holl's unconventional design. A cruciform, copper-clad structure, the building features sheltered corners, each with plants and trees selected to represent the four seasons.

Mr. Fisher invited the university's architecture faculty members to critique Mr. Holl's design, but they had to do so in writing -- no one could attack the plans with a drafting pencil. As for the regents, Mr. Fisher has sold Mr. Holl's building with some creative packaging: He told some skeptics that the brick-colored copper would take on a green patina and blend in with the trees, making the strange building hardly noticeable.

So far, the addition is coming in on schedule and, at $28-million for both renovation and new construction, only about $1-million over budget, due to a competitive construction market in the Twin Cities. Everyone seems happy, including Mr. Fisher. "Art doesn't have to be any more expensive," he says. "It's not as if the architecture is an add-on."

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