Maeda's SIMPLICITY

Perfectly Intimidated

With many of the city offices closed in the Boston area, our main airport closed for an indefinite period, and countless schools/businesses being closed as well, I wondered why my employer would choose to be open today. I especially wondered as I crawled through traffic on roads that were plowed probably hundreds of times but I know that every half block I was pushing the limits of my car's anti-locking brakes.

After driving through the snow for an hour, I breathed a sigh of relief as I drove into the new underground employee garage of MIT housed underneath the new Gehry building, a.k.a. the "Stata Center." Frankly if I were the donor, I'd prefer that the building be known by my name instead of the architect. No offense to famous architects of course.

The garage goes a couple levels deep into the ground and apparently holds the East Coast record for the most concrete poured into such an underground structure. Seems ironic that you would spend all that money to dig out all the rocks to make a gigantic hole, and then pour liquid rock back into the gigantic hole again. My guess is that architects are a type of person that must have felt traumatized when they were young by the experience of building sandcastles at the beach. All that work to dig a hole, and then the tide comes in and your work simply vanishes. "Mom? Did you bring the concrete to the beach?"

So I'm driving into this extremely ugly and conventional parking structure (that wasn't designed by Gehry—kind of like wearing a Prada shirt with Hanes sweatpants) and I turn the corner and there is a fellow that is washing his car with his friend. Most people don't wash their car at 7:30AM in an underground university parking garage, so a closer look revealed that they were campus policemen. Each of them were taking turns cleaning their police cars so that they carried no evidence of the snowstrom. No salt stains, no gigantic swooshes of messy and gloppy white stuff, and most importantly no embarrassing evidence of a perfect thick layer of snow on the very top of the car to make you look like some sort of foofy party cake. The policemen had transformed their car into the opposite of all the cars driving around MIT—their car was perfect. Why? Well, for the intimidation effect I surmised. Policemen and policewomen are super-beings. And they drive super-cars that are perfect. More perfect than your sorry self. So when their lights flash and you get pulled over, you had better call them "Sir" or "Ma'am." I know that I do.

We can say the same thing for beautifully designed modern objects. When they are just all too perfect, you are literally afraid to touch them or even go near them. Perfection commands respect. But perfection isn't human. I do not know for certain if the story that Persian rugs approaching perfection are purposely made defective (out of deference to a higher power) is an urban legend—the Web tells me it's true but I'll believe it when I see one for real. Imperfection, when done well and of intentional nature, is really the highest form of art in my book. I aspire to understand the deep structure of imperfection some day.

Now if I can just get myself to forget this vision I now have of policemen running into the bathroom at Dunkin Donuts with lint brushes to make their uniforms look absolutely perfect in that intimidating way ...