At the Wall Street Journal Law Blog today, Peter Lattman discusses MIT's lawsuit against Frank Gehry: "What’s perhaps most interesting about this lawsuit is the following: Because of their unconventional design — e.g., colliding roofs, seemingly impossible angles — do Gehry patrons assume a certain risk when they commission him to design a building? Robert Campbell, an architect critic for the [Boston] Globe, touched on the issue. 'Because he’s so daring, you figure you’ve got to be daring, too, if you’re a client . . . You know if you hire Frank Gehry there are going to be new kinds of problems.' He added that clients accept the risks because 'they’ll get a building like no other building.'"
Or, as NPR's Tom Regan puts it: "should someone who commissions a striking design like this expect to sacrifice some functionality?
