A couple of weeks ago when I was brows­ing through Google Earth, I came across some pho­tographs of the MIT Ray and Maria Stata Center, more com­monly known as simply the Stata Center.

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This build­ing has always amazed me ever since the first time I stum­bled upon it. It is quite an impres­sive sight. Oddly enough, I live within walk­ing dis­tance of this build­ing. I didn’t real­ize until I read the Wikipedia entry on the build­ing that sev­eral notable people have their offices in the Stata Center, includ­ing Noam Chom­sky, Tim Berners-​Lee and Richard Stallman.

The fun­ni­est thing for me about the archi­tec­ture of the build­ing is that it has always given me a very vis­ceral reminder of Ayn Rand’s novel The Foun­tain­head. Every time I see the build­ing I think that it looks like some­thing Howard Roark would have built.

I have no idea why I always have this reac­tion, because when I actu­ally stop to think about it, I believe that Roark would hate the Stata Center. He would hate it because it doesn’t make any sense. Excerpts from the Wiki entry only high­light this fact:

There is also one lec­ture room where, because of the slight lean of the wall panels, some people have been known to expe­ri­ence ver­tigo. Sound insu­la­tion is almost absent. The build­ing has also been crit­i­cized as insen­si­tive to the needs of its inhab­i­tants, poorly designed for day-​to-​day use[...]

Also later in the entry:

On Octo­ber 31, 2007,[9] MIT sued[10] archi­tect Frank Gehry and the con­struc­tion com­pany, Skan­ska USA Build­ing Inc., for “providing defi­cient design ser­vices and drawings” which caused leaks to spring, masonry to crack, mold to grow, drainage to back up, and falling ice and debris to block emer­gency exits.[8] A Skan­ska spokesper­son said that prior to con­struc­tion Gehry ignored warn­ings from Skan­ska and a con­sult­ing com­pany regard­ing flaws in his design of the amphithe­ater, and rejected a formal request from Skan­ska to modify the esign.

This is most cer­tainly not some­thing that Roark would have done. If not this though, what would one of Roark’s build­ings actu­ally have looked like? It is appar­ently a common spec­u­la­tion that Rand based Roark’s archi­tec­ture on that of Frank Lloyd Wright. Although she has specif­i­cally denied this, it seems to me to be a very close match based upon her descrip­tions of Roark’s architecture.