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Comment by 5lkajsndfa | Hacker News Reader

Busy at 90+ is inspiring. But I had to live near the Weisman Art Museum in the Twin Cities for some time, and I found it a fundamentally silly and depressing building. Especially in the winter. The facade has absurd and irrelevant appendages, the backside is a mundane red brick wall, which suggests the front is all for show. The interior is confusing. The last thing I wanted to see during the MN winter is more gray cold surfaces. It did not integrate at all with the Mississippi bluffs, and it had no integration with the neighborhood.

I happen to live in a neighborhood where Frank Lloyd Wright built a few homes. The homeowner experience is terrible, but the buildings are wonderful.

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The building he designed in Cleveland, the Peter B. Lewis building on the campus of Case Western, suffers from the winter fate of having ice and snow avalanche off the classic Gehry roof design. Initially, I don't think this was accounted for and people were getting hit. Eventually, they figured out that they needed more specific walkways where the snow wouldn't hit pedestrians.

The building also stood out substantially for quite some time. That part of campus was mainly comprised of buildings from the early 1900's. Today, a lot of new construction has sprung up around that area so it's not quite as jarring, but like any Gehry building, it still stands out.

I was at Case when the Peter B Lewis building opened. I don't recall people getting hit by falling ice but they'd put up warning signs and maybe close the main entrance after snow (which in Cleveland was often). There was a shooting in the building too. It took 7 hours for the SWAT team to find the gunman and get the hostages out. Apparently the curvy walls and large atrium design are a complete tactical nightmare.

I was at Case a few years after PBL opened so I could be misremembering or just hear of people getting hit anecdotally.

I was aware of the shooting nightmare that took place there and specifically remember how odd it was hearing the song "Pumped Up Kicks" playing inside of that building.

>Apparently the curvy walls and large atrium design are a complete tactical nightmare.

A building shouldn't be designed to facilitate giving concealment/cover to people who expect their entrance to be violently opposed. I would argue that if you're going to give design consideration to that it should be in the opposite direction.

I'm convinced the guy is an architectural equivalent of Andy Kaufmann. The closest thing to an "anti-Frank Lloyd Wright" that exists. He knows he's making you uncomfortable, and he doesn't care because that's the point. Which is fine for an art installation, not so much for something people have to live with for decades.

The Simpsons: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1p6rrn-PimU

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