In December 2004, for example, he agreed to sandblast parts of his $274 million Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles in response to a report that found that the building’s skin produced excessive glare.īut Paul Hewins, executive vice president and area general manager of the company, told The Globe: “This is not a construction issue. Gehry has had to address problems with his buildings before. spokeswoman, said, “As a matter of policy we don’t comment on pending litigation, and our lawsuit speaks for itself.” “The professors and the people that we all did the building for are sending me e-mails dumbfounded that their institution is doing this,” he said. Gehry said he had received several expressions of support from people at the institute. “I think the issues are fairly minor,” he added. The chances of it getting done ever without something colliding or some misstep are small.” A building goes together with seven billion pieces of connective tissue. “These things are complicated,” he said, “and they involved a lot of people, and you never quite know where they went wrong.
Gehry, whose firm was paid $15 million for the project, said construction problems were inevitable in the design of complex buildings. Gehry’s firm, Gehry Partners, based in Los Angeles, of negligence and breach of contract in the design of the center, which houses laboratories, classrooms, offices and meeting rooms. The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, was filed in Suffolk County Superior Court in Boston last week and first reported yesterday in The Boston Globe. Gehry once said that it “looks like a party of drunken robots got together to celebrate.” The center, which features angular sections that appear to be falling on top of one another, opened to great acclaim in the spring of 2004. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has sued the architect Frank Gehry and a construction company, claiming that “design and construction failures” in the institute’s $300 million Stata Center resulted in pervasive leaks, cracks and drainage problems that have required costly repairs.