Navigation could be client or architect driven; I don't know about MIT, but I've been in Facebook's MPK 20 and 21 designed by Gehry, and they're also hard to navigate, but that's true of most of Facebook's buildings, and Gehry clearly adopted the client's style of ignoring the navigational needs of a building's users. Simple things like walking paths that are visually and texturally distinct from the sea of desks are super useful, but missing. Again, it's hard to know if the architect suggested these things and then followed direction from the client to ignore them, but design is a collaboration and there's plenty of blame to go around.
At least for Stata/CSAIL, the “irregular connectivity” was a celebrated aspect of the design from its inception and approval.
Stata was meant to be the spiritual successor to the old, decrepit (though illustrious) Building 20, which had a long history of ad hoc collaboration, often driven by the constraints of the physical space (i.e. the wall between your office and the next has a hole in it where some piece of equipment was routed in 1957).
During the Stata hype phase, there was a lot of talk at MIT that the idiosyncratic structure would encourage the same kinds of collaboration through random-walk encounters.
The strange thing is that they built the exact opposite of building 20: an expensive, delicate, complicated building where the grad students wouldn't dare pick up a sledgehammer to run some ethernet cables through a wall in a hurry. How could they expect the new building to fill the same role as the old one?
If they wanted to reproduce the environment of Building 20, they should have built the whole structure out of T-slot aluminum extrusions and LEGO.
At least for Stata/CSAIL, the “irregular connectivity” was a celebrated aspect of the design from its inception and approval.
Stata was meant to be the spiritual successor to the old, decrepit (though illustrious) Building 20, which had a long history of ad hoc collaboration, often driven by the constraints of the physical space (i.e. the wall between your office and the next has a hole in it where some piece of equipment was routed in 1957).
During the Stata hype phase, there was a lot of talk at MIT that the idiosyncratic structure would encourage the same kinds of collaboration through random-walk encounters.