What do you do in Stata? How much time do you spend here?

I'm on the third floor in the Distributed Robotics Lab under the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and we basically work on how to get a bunch of low-ability robots to do lots of things. We've got self-organizing robots, underwater robots, gardening robots... Over the summer, I was here for about 100 hours a week. I guess I've slept here a few times, but don't tell my professor that.

How does the layout of the building contribute to so many different labs and groups occupying the space?

There is a defined area for each lab group, and within each of them are open communal spaces that are really effective. They facilitate interactions very easily -- it feels natural for all of us to eat lunch together, and there is a sense of openness and collaboration that wouldn't necessarily be the case if we were placed in any other rigid, boxy research building. The group dynamic is really great. However, I've heard a few professors mention that because the walls are curved and so many columns and crannies, it's difficult to add more spaces for groups to expand.

In light of the recent lawsuit against Gehry for flaws in the building's design, what would you say are its most pressing problems?

The leaking, for sure. One of the Ph.D students in my lab built a set of pretty cool-looking gutters that channels the water from the ceiling into the bucket. Also, an entire wall of my lab is a window without any shades, so there is often an unbearable glare on our computer screens. So to combat that, we actually designed a robot that climbs on the window's aluminum frame and runs around with a deployable shade. His name is Shady. [You can meet Shady here.]

My python professor tells me that although he's been in Stata since it was built in 2004, he still gets lost. How does the labyrinthine navigability affect people's daily activities here?

Oh, there have definitely been times where I needed to get somewhere in the building and I couldn't find a staircase to get there. There are two towers and nine floors, which crash together in unpredictable places, but I mainly stay in Gates Tower or the fourth floor common area where we have large gatherings. You slowly start to learn that some floors are very logically connected -- such as the fifth and sixth floors, which have double height spaces that join similar lab groups -- whereas others are really segmented, and you sometimes just have to...guess.

Do the majority of your colleagues enjoy the building? Do you like it?

We complain about it a lot. That's pretty typical. But that said, not being an architecture student, I think that for a place where so much group thinking and collaboration happens, it accomplishes what it does pretty well.