Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Innovation in a box

Following up on yesterday's post about invention, innovation, and diffusion in the arts, I had a great opportunity to explore what role architecture can play in fostering the creative impulse. Even though my neighbor blogger James S. Russell is far more qualified to attack the issue, I've never let the lack of actual knowledge stop me from ranting in the past. So, here it goes.

The opportunity came in the form of the new Frank O. Gehry building on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA, that just opened last week. The building was designed to house a bunch of insanely smart and potentially creative individuals, from the Laboratory for Computer Science, to the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, to the Laboratory for Information Decision Systems, and the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, along with classrooms, open spaces, a 'student main street', and such.

According to at least one MIT official during the early phases of construction, quoted in the Boston Globe, the purpose of the building was to be radically different than the traditional academic structure:

''We're in the innovation business and what we're looking for is a building that will encourage innovation,'' said John Guttag, head of MIT's electrical engineering and computer science department. ''Which is very different from a lot of other buildings, where if you say what do you want to accomplish, you'd say efficiencies. We're looking for the good ideas....It's not the number of people per square foot, but the number of ideas per square foot.''

In typical Gehry fashion, the building is an amalgam of swoops and curves, what one early critic called 'a drunken barn dance as it might be represented in a Disney cartoon.' It holds 'villages' of offices, and clusters of specialists, with lots of huge chalkboards (yes, chalkboards, not marker boards or digital drawing screens) for students, faculty, and teams.

I'll let the professionals critique the facility and its success...I thought it looked cool. More interesting to me is the juxtaposition of the new architecture with the architecture it replaced. MIT's famous Building 20, which stood on the same ground, was one of the most ugly, plain, bland, unhealthy, and boxy looking structures you could imagine (here's a lovely photo essay to prove it). As MIT provost Robert Brown commented: ''Building 20 never had spaces that inspired anyone to do anything.''

And yet, Building 20 was home to an astounding collection of inventions and innovations over its five decades during and after World War II. Called the 'magical incubator,' the facility was the birthplace of microwave radar, atomic clocks, Doc Edgerton's underwater cameras, James Worden's solar vehicles, Noam Chomsky's linguistic innovation, and other discoveries.

The irony shouldn't be lost on arts and cultural managers. We continue to build a massive infrastructure of new performing arts halls, museums, exploratoriums, and other intended hothouses for creative experience -- most of them glorious, massive, shiny, spacious, comfortable, and opulent. And yet, for many of us, our most powerful engagement with creative expression has come in a shabby theater with horrible sets, in a smoky underground jazz club, in a terribly cramped exhibition space, or at a sweaty outdoor festival with dismal acoustics.

It wasn't the building that inspired us. It was the connection within it. At best, a building can frame our experience, and then get out of its way.

The challenge of constructed space, especially space designed to encourage innovation and creativity, is balancing the impulse to hard-wire the way we think people should interact with the need to let them find their own way. Building 20 was a blank canvas, horribly blank. That, and the brilliant bunch of individuals that it housed, may have been the source of its magical powers.

As my father says of working there -- 'I could drive a nail anywhere, and not worry about it.'

I'm not suggesting that we build ugly, constraining, dark, and claustrophobic buildings for the arts -- God knows we've got plenty of those. I'm just offering the idea that the true power of the creative experience (for both artist and audience) might live somewhere other than the steel, granite, and glass.

posted on Wednesday, May 12, 2004 | permalink