M.I.T. is suing famed architect Frank Gehry.

A Gehry building that cost the school $300 million has been leaking, molding, and generally busting its metallic seams.

Gehry’s pieces are remarkable. They’re strikingly original edifices that bear the stamp of the Canadian architect in their waving, tortuous, serpentine forms. I personally can’t help staring at and enjoying them. They’re a writer and photographer’s dream: impressive and bizarre.

But I also can’t help taking issue with the man and his apparent ethos. He seems to operate by the credo that “If it doesn’t bankrupt a city, it isn’t architecture.” His Guggenheim museum in Bilbao is a titanium whale. Why titanium? Because other metals “just wouldn’t do”.

Okay, fair enough, titanium’s resistance to corrosion is impressive and it’s twice as strong as aluminum, though 60 percent heavier. We definitely appreciate its powerful nature when it covers our airplanes. But does it need to form a nuclear-looking shell around a museum all the more imposing because it graces the river bank of a small industrial town in the Spanish Basque Country?

I fail to see the necessity of such high expenditure for what could otherwise be visually accomplished through a cheaper medium.

Granted, Frankie’s work has hauled in a good deal of tourism to an otherwise desolate city, but I ask again…titanium?! Really.

When it came to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, arguably the jewel of Downtown Los Angeles, Gehry knew better than to pull the titanium card (maybe he guessed it would never fly with the much wealthier but more self-sustaining metropolis). Yet he managed, sans titanium, to make a memorable and not a little beautiful building.

But.

Did the stainless steel (a concession we all appreciate) building really have to cost the Disney family and Los Angeles County a staggering $274 million?

It’s hard to say; I’m neither an architect, an engineer, a tax collector or a bond monger.

What I can say is that a piece of art that must also be functional, such as M.I.T.’s controversial Stata Center and Disney Hall, and that also happen to come with extremely high price tags, should not, after all dues are payed, present any problems.

Although Disney Hall has neither leaked nor rotted, its steel exterior generated enough glare to unite the neighborhood in complaining about the heat the building was producing: the sidewalk out front was apparently steaming hot at 140 F. Gehry resorted to sanding his baby’s panels to reduce the glare.

But he shouldn’t have had to do that.

While I said I thought his pristine pieces lovely, they do look alarmingly like crumpled pieces of paper. And paper, that isn’t even paper, shouldn’t come at such a high price.

Even the Simpsons take a stab at that. And who can argue with the Simpsons?*

*YouTube seems only to have “The Seven Beer Snitch,” the 14th episode of its 16th season, in Spanish, which perhaps considering the Guggenheim’s location in Spain is…a propos.