The new Stata Center on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in Cambridge was designed from the inside out, according to its architect, Frank Gehry, with a greater emphasis placed on how the building functions rather than its external appearance.

There are two ways to view the landmark Intelligence Sciences building, otherwise known as the Ray and Maria Stata Center, which opened this past month on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Each way has its adherents in one precinct or another around the city.

One way, from the outside, offers a view through the lens of our recent tendency toward mass consumption of high culture architecture in Boston. The Hub has, in the past several years, added (or we still hope to add) to its collection structures by Rafael Vinoly, Diller and Scofidio, and Christian Menn, all famous out-of-town architects.

For those who are counting, MIT is at the forefront example of this type of endeavor, sporting new projects by esteemed architects Stephen Holl, Fumihiko Maki, Kevin Roche, Charles Correa and, of course, the renowned Frank Gehry. Gehry, designer of the Stata Center in partnership with Boston-based Cannon Architects, has become something of a brand late in his career. And because of the exclusivity of the Gehry brand (besides looking like nothing from the past, his current buildings are extremely complex and expensive to construct) not just anybody can get one.

Several cities do have them. The most famous is in Bilbao, Spain. Others stand in Los Angeles, Seattle, Paris and Prague in the Czech Republic. Even Princeton University will have one soon – a new Gehry-designed Science Library. Now, thanks to MIT’s ability to raise and spend $300 million on this single building, Greater Boston is in league with these other cities. Even without a new Fenway Park, we live in what is now surely a world-class city. How can we tell? “We got our Gehry!”

Actually, Boston already had a Gehry building: nearly 20 years ago Frank Gehry designed a renovation for a building that became Tower Records and now is home to the Boston Virgin Megastore, at the corner of Newbury Street and Massachusetts Avenue in Boston’s Back Bay. Like the Stata Center, the project at 360 Newbury St. generated much discussion. The controversy was not so much about the building itself, a foursquare antique that Gehry clad in grey, lead-coated copper, placing outsized cornices at its top and bottom. That controversy was about the Claes Oldenburg sculpture – a giant tea bag – that had been slated to hang from a notch in the building’s south wall, high above the extension to the Massachusetts Turnpike. Twenty years later, the sculpture still is not installed, allowing us to recall that there once was such a thing as going too far in Boston.

So that’s one way to view Stata: Metro Boston has added an authentic Gehry to its collection of architecture, one more high-art tourist attraction. But this view is a reflection of us as architectural consumers, not of Frank Gehry as a producer of architecture that is profound; work that perhaps ought to become a brand. For that, there is another view, this one from inside the Stata Center itself.

In his explanations of this building, Gehry is careful to point out that, like most great architecture, Stata was not designed as an object to be viewed from the outside. It was designed from the inside out, so that people working in it – researchers, teachers and a thousand students from MIT’s newly combined Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems and Department of Linguistics and Philosophy – could physically work with each other in revolutionary new ways. It is the space that counts in this building; space whose very conception telegraphs the spirit of integration and cooperation of a reborn MIT.

Much has been made, as visible construction has progressed over the past three years, of the unusual external form of the Stata Center, its high cost and the various computer technologies used in its design and construction, to say nothing of the great care taken on this project by its consultants – some 12,000 hours of detailing went into the design of structural steel alone. Now that it is built and used every day, now that the startling spaces of its main public way, saturated with light and color, are integrated into the “endless corridor” of the central pedestrian spine of the MIT campus, you can visit in person and see for yourself its glorious interior space.

Plying the Trade

“This is inspiring!”

That is how Dr. Fred Tausch, retired MIT chemical engineering graduate, described the experience this past month when the university staged its grand opening for the Stata Center. Tausch was not alone in expressing such thoughts. In the building for the first time, he gave voice to an opinion shared by hundreds of people that day: this building encloses space that is truly inspiring.

Tausch has a few misgivings about the finishes that border the space. “It’s raw concrete! And plywood!” It’s true that the interior materials are not fussy or exotic, although the use of plywood for furniture, certain partitions and even ceiling panels in places may just be a tribute to an exotic past. Around the turn of the last century, when plywood was invented, it was considered a fantastic interior finish material, nearly as rare and precious as marble. Its use here certainly quotes from the designer’s past, in which rawboned and surprising industrial materials (including chain-link fence and blacktop, neither of which are in this building) found their ways into Gehry’s projects. In this building where soaring, angular, transparent three-dimensional space is the thing, plain materials such as plywood, concrete and brick do not detract at all from the central experience of the very animated space.

That experience embodies not just the possibility of communication, but ensures its likelihood. The space augments intentional, accidental, physical and visual interaction among the people who use it. Not since Frank Lloyd Wright (himself an early user of plywood) attempted to “break the tyranny of the box” has any architect actually done it to this extent. The Stata Center is a great experiment in human interaction. Its design blurs boundaries and provides exciting views between public ways and private workplaces (a few of which are already undergoing minor renovations) in the form of flying bridges and sweeping, circular staircases, as well as giant windows and layers of meandering spaces. All of these architectural elements call attention to the actions of the people who make up the community using the place.

In the Ray and Maria Stata Center, we do, indeed, have our Gehry. It is an inspiring and historic building that enhances the culture of architecture in the Greater Boston area.