| Summary: | When word got out that architect Frank Gehry was proposing to model the 720,000-square-foot Stata Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on an orangutan village, there were those who thought the architect had finally lost it. Orangutan life was discussed, but in the context of creating what is arguably the most sociologically complex building erected on a campus in recent years. Along a dreary stretch of once-industrial Vassar Street, Gehry has conjured yet another eye-popping assemblage of curvy silos and angled towers. The building started out as a way to bring together several related programs in the computer sciences. A similar but finer-grained gradation of privacy occurs in the two towers that rise from the fifth floor upward. They both curve in a C-shape to focus the action on double-height lounges, each with its own spiral connecting stair, that serve the neighborhoods of researchers.
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