MIT’s Stata Center: you either love it or hate it. It turns out that MIT is moving quickly away from the ‘love’ end of the spectrum. It’s suing the building’s world-renowned architect, Frank Gehry and his company, for negligence, accusing the architect of flawed design that has led to leaks and mold in the chaotic and bizarre-looking building. The Globe says MIT has spent more than $1.5 million in repairs, including the rebuilding of a cracked amphitheater behind the building.

The building, which houses the computer science and artificial intelligence lab and other groups, has few fans. The cover of the new book entitled Architecture of the Absurd: How ‘Genius’ Disfigured a Practical Art by BU’s former president John Silber features the infamous building quite prominently on its cover.

And a Boston Globe columnist even suggested in a column last month that the “garishly modern” building should be a candidate for demolition (along with other architectural eyesores in Massachusetts)

To be fair, this isn’t the first time a famous architect has been accused of shoddy design work. Archinect, a website run by architects, in reviewing

Silber’s book, gives some other examples of embarassing architectural moments:

In Boston, Jose Lluis Sert’s unprotected northeast-facing entrance to the B.U. library flooded the first floor with snow and ice every New England winter. In Los Angeles, sunlight glinting off the sharply angled steel curves of Gehry’s Walt Disney Music Hall raises the temperature of neighbors’ houses by 15 degrees. And of course, Libeskind’s World Trade Center plan, with its spindly 1776-foot tower and quarter-mile-high gardens, proved so impractical it had to be re-designed, in an exasperating negotiation hardly worthy of the complex tragedy of the site.

Update November 8: The NY Times’s article on this quotes Gehry:

“These things are complicated and they involved a lot of people, and you never quite know where they went wrong. A building goes together with seven billion pieces of connective tissue. The chances of it getting done ever without something colliding or some misstep are small.”

“I think the issues are fairly minor,” he added. “M.I.T. is after our insurance.”

I should add that the construction company that built the Stata Center, Skanska USA Building Inc, is also a target of the lawsuit.