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Comment by Jach | Hacker News Reader

I remember reading back in 2004 a suggestion that MIT should force its architecture students to study in the building designed for the CS students and let the CS students have the nice architects' building. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_and_Maria_Stata_Center vs https://foursquare.com/v/mit-building-7-rogers-building/4ab9... (Amusingly MIT sued Frank Gehry over the building later due to flaws, but it's been settled.)

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Yeah, that Stata Center building is such a joke. It makes me mad, and I haven't even set foot in the building. Such a waste of resources and yet another example of what happens when you try to push form over function.

I'd say they've successfully deconstructed what it means to be a building though.

If I remember correctly, my university constructed a new building for the architecture department but it was so impractical they gave it to computer science instead.

My university had a building for the architecture department that was originally designed to be completely covered in vines so as to "hide" the actual architecture of it, to clear the students minds of preconceived notations, etc, etc.

Unfortunately, this was in the late 60s, so the concrete they used turned out to be poisonous to plant life, so no vines ever covered the building, there were some sad scrawny things in a corner, but that's it. And the underlying building was of course really ugly, so, yeah, that was a pretty big fail:

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkitekturskolans_byggnad,_%C3...

That building singlehandedly represents everything that's wrong with the profession that used to be architecture.

Fact: the building was so ugly that it self-ignited.

I did computer science, almost all our lectures and classes were around the gorgeous castle courtyard. We pitied the architecture students... :-)

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