Lost in the Funhouse

• CSI: Construction>
  Buildings expert Joseph Lstiburek points out some of the key potential mistakes in the raising of MIT's Stata Center.

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CSI: Construction

The Ray and Maria Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is an outlandish cartoon village in listing brick and scrolling aluminum, with a Möbius-strip main corridor inside. An italic-angled entrance, shaped like the cutting edge itself, ushers visitors off the drab Cambridge street. But then you see it, tha t universal symbol of malfunction: an orange mechanical lift.

Yes, MIT, the very apogee of tech sophistication, seems to have bought itself a bright-yellow lemon. The showstopper home for its computer-science, linguistics, and philosophy departments cost $300 million to build ($200 million more than initial estimates) and opened in 2004 (four years behind schedule). And now the school has turned to the courts to express its buyer's remorse. A lawsuit filed in October against both the construction firm and the architect alleges "design and construction failures," negligence, and breach of contract, which have cost the university $1.5 million in repairs already, with millions more likely to come.

The suit grabbed headlines because the architect's name is Frank Gehry, fueling a backlash against celebrity architects and their flashy designs. The go-to guy for this take is John Silber, the former president of Boston University, who has just published a book called Architecture of the Absurd: How "Genius" Disfigured a Practical Art. The Stata Center is on the cover.

This kerfuffle may have little to do with outward appearances, though. True, some of Gehry's other buildings have been tweaked after opening their doors, as when the steel-sided Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles had to be sanded to remove a glare that could practically cook eggs on the sidewalk. And occupants have questioned elements of the Stata Center's design. ("I still would prefer straight to slanted walls, so as to put up bookshelves and a blackboard," says linguist Noam Chomsky, who has an office there.)

But what about the "construction" piece of the lawsuit? What if the Stata Center's woes are really about the growing gulf between computer-aided design and literal bricks and mortar? To find out, I decided to visit MIT with the Sherlock Holmes of construction.

"This was incredibly dumb." I am standing at a Stata Center side entrance with Joseph Lstiburek as he points out a brick wall that meets a glass wall with a superficial connection, allowing moisture to seep across the porous brick from outside to inside. Lstiburek (pronounced STEE-bu-rek), an engineer with a PhD, is a frequent expert witness in construction lawsuits and an international authority on leaks who gets paid tens of thousands of dollars to cut holes in the sides of buildings and inform the owners how theirs were built wrong. As an independent, unpaid, informal observer, he has had his eye on the Stata Center for several years: "It was obvious it wasn't going to work from watching it go up."

Lstiburek speculates that the Stata Center's leaks are caused by "fishmouthing" of the waterproof membranes, discontinuities between the roof and walls, and poor design of the window-to-wall connections. But he claims something else is wrong--something even more basic. During a 45-minute, PowerPoint-aided lecture, he shows me MIT's own photos of the center being built. "You see the yellow stuff, gypsum board. And you'll see the membrane going over this and then the brick. The insulation that is put on the inside should have been put on the outside. They just have them in the wrong order." In the winter, when a building like this is heated, explains Lstiburek, who wrote the U.S. Department of Energy's handbook on moisture control, water vapor "sweats" through the wall into the insulation and is trapped there by the waterproof membrane, just like your T-shirt gets sopping under a pleather jacket. This erodes the wall, causes mold, and even makes the insulation smell like dirty socks.

On our tour of the building, he sees inconsistencies--one transition from glass skylight to brick wall is handled beautifully, but another is sloppy. Mold is growing on the front of the building as rain spills down its face, with no windowsill or lip to stop it. Outside by the amphitheater, he highlights white spots on the brick. Though the amphitheater has already been rebuilt once (a drainage mat was installed underneath, which cost $1.5 million, according to the lawsuit), the white spots, known as "efflorescence," indicate that water is still seeping from underneath the masonry and evaporating, leaving minerals behind.

So who is to blame? Lstiburek posits that the architects should have done a better job of specifying materials and techniques. And the construction firm should have been more rigorous in its quality control. On both fronts, though, these are fundamental errors of craft, not design. In other words, Gehry's billowing sheets of metal and unexpected angles aren't at fault: It's how they were specced out and implemented. Two of Gehry's more prominent creations-- the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Seattle's Experience Music Project--haven't had any construction problems.