Buildings
MIT's Stata Center Opens, Raises Questions about Cost Control
(archrecord.construction.com - 05/19/04)
By Ted
Smalley Bowen
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Courtesy Massachussetts Institute of Technology |
MIT last week officially opened Frank
Gehry's much-anticipated Stata Center for Computer, Information,
and Intelligence Sciences, the keystone of the school's ambitious
billion-dollar campus expansion.
Much has been made of the almost $300
million price tag for the sprawling deconstructivist complex,
a figure once projected at $200 million. Together with Steven
Holl's award-winning 2002 Simmons Hall dormitory, which at
$95 million came in well over its $60 million budget, the
marquee projects serve as case studies of institutional investment
in serious architecture.
MIT is hardly alone in incurring cost
overruns and expensive program changes. Rem Koolhaas' student
center on the Illinois Institute of Technology campus ran
into schedule and cost overruns.
Besides the obvious costs associated
with the aesthetic risks (which, points out MIT Executive
Vice President John Curry, introduce construction techniques
unfamiliar to most contractors) and costly products associated
with an architect like Gehry, MIT officials, Gehry, and Holl's
project architect Tim Bade says their projects ran into a
perfect storm of national and regional economic conditions.
Having planned during the go-go '90s, MIT put several major
projects up for bid just as the dot-com bubble burst and Boston's
Central Artery Tunnel "Big Dig" project tied up
much of the area's construction capacity. Hence construction
costs jumped 25-percent at this time, according to Gilbane
Construction Company’s 2000 review of MIT's construction
plan, Curry says.
Current trends in materials and fuel
prices point to higher project costs, according to analysts,
who blame the high cost of steel on a global shortage and
US import tariffs.
The Stata Center evolved from an early-1990s
scheme for a 150,000 square-foot, roughly $160 million building
in keeping with MIT's rectilinear neo-classical main complex.
A 1997 revision called for a 324,000 square-foot structure,
at about $200 million.
But program changes (the addition of
a below ground parking garage and 100,000 square feet for
day care and fitness centers and pedestrian thoroughfare)
and market conditions dramatically increased construction
costs.
As of May, the official total for the
730,000 square-foot complex was $283.5 million, of which about
$31 million went to design, says project manager Nancy Joyce,
who noted that much of the project's contingency fund went
to cover construction costs.
Nevertheless, the Stata Center project
was "in the norm for this type of lab building in the
US," says William Mitchell, former dean of the school
of architecture and planning, now head of the media Arts and
Sciences Program and architectural advisor to MIT president
Charles Vest. On the Stata project, "we value-engineered,
cut things, bit bullets," Gehry adds.
As of early May, MIT was reviewing Holl’s
Simmons project for "errors and omissions," which
are covered under the school's insurance policy, according
to Curry. The university, meanwhile, has negotiated a guaranteed
maximum price of about $95 million for the Fumihiko Maki-designed
Media Lab extension, slated for a 2005 groundbreaking, according
to Mitchell. In riding the late '90s investment wave and persevering
through the downturn and project overruns, MIT's strategy
has been one of "principled opportunism," says Mitchell.
"It's an investment for a hundred years at the very least.
You can't let short-term economic exigencies deter you."
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