Chapter two case Studies

Harvard University

Cambridge, USA

On 28 October 1636, the Great and General Court of Massachusetts Bay convened a meeting. Amongst the afternoon’s busy agenda was an epochal act – the endowment of £400 towards the construction of ‘a schoale or colledge’. The founding of a college only six years after the colonization of Massachusetts Bay was a bold feat. Yet the colony leaders were unwavering in their belief that for the experiment to prosper, the New World needed a leadership of educated men. The College opened in 1638 upon a one acre plot of land in Newtowne, a village six kilometres from Boston (quickly renamed Cambridge in recognition of the English university of which many of the Colony’s leaders were alumni). This plot has grown over the centuries to form the heart of the university today, Old Harvard Yard. In the Old Yard, Harvard has developed a setting captivating for its sense of place, indelibly tied to the essence and reputation of the university.

How the Yard has achieved this rare quality is a chronicle of seemingly haphazard decisions. Harvard Hall I, the college’s first

purpose built structure, was the largest hitherto built in the English colonies. The ground plan took the form of an E-shape, an unusual shape for an academic building, not seen at Oxbridge and possibly derived from Elizabeth manor houses. The building contained almost all college functions: a hall (for lectures, recitations, and college functions), a kitchen, buttery, library and student rooms. From the outset the college adopted the English residential system. Despite the additional costs incurred, the trustees held a firm conviction in the advantages of an intimate community where scholars studied, slept, dined and worshiped together. The same tenet will be encountered throughout the history of American higher education. Harvard’s spatial arrangements also proved influential. Rejecting the linked ranges of the Oxbridge colleges, Harvard’s next stage of development was the creation of a number of separate structures. By 1655 Harvard consisted of four buildings: Harvard Hall I, Indian College (demolished 1697), the president’s house, and Goffe College (demolished 1670s). Harvard Hall I and the Indian College were set well behind the latter two structures, which were positioned close to the street front (Figure 1.9). The buildings were located on the boundary of the College’s narrow land, with little consideration of visual unity. This spatial layout may have stemmed from a practical consideration to minimize fire risk amongst the wooden structures, or perhaps from a wish to realize in physical form one of Harvard’s founding ideologies, that it was purposed to serve its community and thus should be open and accessible to it.²¹

The arrangement of the Yard was transformed, though, with a new programme of rebuilding beginning in the 1670s. Following its deterioration, Harvard Hall I was replaced in 1671–1677. Significantly, it did not face the west towards the street-front, but south. It was positioned as the north range of a three-sided courtyard, which was to be completed by a new president’s house (1680) on the south and Old Stoughton College (1698, razed 1781) on the east, marking the inception of a more formal approach to planning. In 1718, the president’s house was replaced by a more substantial dormitory, Massachusetts Hall, today’s Harvard’s oldest surviving building. Architecturally, it demonstrated greater sophistication than Harvard’s earlier buildings, possessing a simple, early Georgian dignity. The form of its roof and twin panelled chimneys of the gable ends proffered

a model that succeeding generations of Harvard architects would turn to (for instance, Kirkland House, 1913). Harvard, Stoughton and Massachusetts Halls formed an overall pattern constituting a small, well-defined, three-sided courtyard – a concept that can be traced to Emmanuel College, Cambridge (Figure 2.18). Both centres of Puritanism, Emmanuel and Harvard shared notable links, not least that Harvard’s Board of Overseers was formed overwhelmingly by Emmanuel alumni.²²

The three-sided courtyard was to hold an influential position in the American college tradition, appearing again at Harvard in the eighteenth century as another open quadrangle was created. To form a three-sided courtyard with Harvard Hall II, two buildings were erected to the north: Holden Chapel (1744) and Hollis Hall (1763). The tiny Holden Chapel was undoubtedly Harvard’s richest building to date. Possessing paired pilasters, a full wooden entablature, and a carved tympanum, it is a simple yet classically elegant structure. Hollis Hall, built as a dormitory to cater for increased enrolment, was four storeys high, with a central section capped by a pediment. In appearance, it was highly similar to the recently-built Nassau Hall at Princeton.²³ The chapel was, interestingly, entered not from the courtyard, but from the west – the street façade. The area of both the courtyards remained exposed to the west, orientated in the direction of the Cambridge Commons. The planning was palpably shaped by a desire to cultivate interaction with Cambridge. The open courtyard format of the Yard reflected the medieval ideal of a scholastic community living and studying together, yet Harvard considered itself a part of society, and thus the separate structures that constituted the Yard were orientated outward rather than inward. It was a trend that clearly distinguished it from its English predecessors and it endured until the late nineteenth century.

In 1764, fire destroyed Harvard Hall II. Its replacement, the current Harvard Hall, was a consciously eloquent expression of the school’s rising stature. In High Georgian style, the centre of the main façade and the end elevations were pedimented. A cupola rising above the central pavilion signalled the building’s presence on the skyline. Although architecturally neither avant-garde nor monumental, the early buildings of Harvard demonstrate the understated grandeur and totality that can be achieved by conforming to one building material and style, in this case red brick and Georgian.

In the first half of the nineteenth century building continued, to apparently little programme. Various building materials and styles were adopted, yet two structures of this period have come to establish the perimeters of the Old Yard: Holworthy and University Halls. Holworthy (1811) formed the northern boundary of the Yard, while University (1813) determined its scale. Designed by Charles Bulfinch, the later building evidences the Federal Style in its low pitched roof, symmetrical façade and cornice with dentils. In its granite surface adorned with Ionic pilasters, it provided a vivid contrast to its plain, red brick predecessors. The building inaugurated the development of an academic precinct in front of University Hall that transferred the focus of the institution away from the public realm towards a more intimate hub.²⁴

The most prolific phase of building at Harvard yet occurred with the election of Charles Eliot as president (1869–1909). During his term, 35 substantial new structures or reworkings came to fruition (compared with 34 in the school’s previous 233 year history). Despite this, Eliot was no architectural devotee. His concern was purely for functional, well-constructed buildings, an attitude that offered to benefactors of the college and their architects considerable leeway in presenting aesthetic preferences. The buildings of this era were a veritable medley of architectural styles. The Old Yard was further delineated by Thayer Hall, built in 1869 in a heavy Italianate style; by Weld Hall, of Northern Renaissance design dating to 1870; and Matthews Hall, a neo-Gothic structure built in 1871. Sever Hall was built to accommodate classrooms in 1880, sited in the eastern third of the yard parallel to University Hall. Designed by H. H. Richardson, it presents a classically Richardsonian combination of lavishness and monumentality, yet seeks an affiliation with the historic buildings of the Old Yard. Like them, it employs red brick and its eastern doorway is a type of High Georgian entrance that would be at home in the Old Yard.

Under Eliot, Harvard also greatly extended its presence north of the Yard, in an area which came to be known as the North Yard. An impressive number of buildings were constructed in a menagerie of architectural styles scattered across the North Yard. Memorial Hall (Figure 2.19), designed in the 1870s by the firm of Ware and Van Brunt, is a Ruskinian-Gothic building, awe-inspiring in its scale and imaginative silhouette; Hemenway Gymnasium, by the firm

Peabody and Stern, was completed in 1878 as a novel mixture of Renaissance, Queen Anne and Gothic forms; Austin Hall, designed by H. H. Richardson in 1881, is a neo-Romanesque structure in pink granite and sandstone; Langdell Hall (by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, 1906) with its imperial porticoes, white limestone façade and classical detailing was alien in spirit to all its neighbours. Not only did architectural style enjoy free rein in this period, neither was a definitive plan for development adopted, a circumstance that was bemoaned. The president’s son, Charles Eliot, rued that ‘permitting donors of buildings and gates to choose their sites is fatal to general effect.’ Architect Charles McKim later cautioned that ‘some plan is woefully needed at Harvard’.²⁵

Such recommendations came to fruition under President Lowell (1909–1933). An enthusiast for architecture, Lowell displayed tremendous concern for the proper planning and control of the physical growth of the institution and during his tenure much of Harvard assumed the physical character it is known for today. The construction of the huge Widener Library (1914) immediately to the east of Old Yard, and its companion piece opposite, Memorial Church (1932) (Figure 2.20), defined a new quadrangular space, the Tercentenary Quadrangle, where the commencement exercises are held. The most important manifestation of the Lowell administration’s policy of land use and acquisition was the development of a new campus of freshman dormitories, near the Charles River – the South Yard. The Georgian Revival was selected as the university’s official architectural idiom, along with the adoption of a single architectural firm, Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge. It was a far more formal and consistent approach than had ever been enacted before at Harvard, and it engendered a new and harmonious brand of Harvard architecture throughout the enlarged campus.

Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge’s 1910 master plan provided a series of freshman dormitories, which later became the foundation of the House system. The introduction of the House System in 1919 saw the remodelling of these dormitories and fresh construction in the South Yard to create seven houses (since expanded to ten) in which undergraduates resided, dined and took some instruction, modelled on Oxbridge’s colleges. Like the English medieval colleges, the houses assumed the form of linked structures grouped around enclosed or nearly enclosed courts. In their

inward-turning, sequestered nature, these structures represent a striking departure from the traditional model of separate collegiate buildings gregarious to their community. Yet in physical terms, the houses perfectly project the spirit of colonial Harvard. Forming a stately border to the Charles River, the buildings alluded to the eighteenth-century architecture of the Harvard Yard. At each individual house, ornamentation subtly differed thus imbuing each academic community with its individual identity. McKinlock Hall, for example, copied the entrance of eighteenth-century Hollis Hall, whilst the ornate scrollwork on Dunster House’s gables was inspired by that on Holden Chapel. The new desire for collegiate intimacy also wielded an impact upon the character of the Yard. In the 1920s and 1930s, seven narrow halls were slotted along its boundary (Figure 2.21). Screening out the noise of the evergrowing Cambridge, the halls formed a physical barrier between the university and host city that reflected Harvard’s new interpretation of the educational ideal. With Lowell’s additions, the character of Harvard Yard was fixed, to be preserved until the present day despite the momentous changes that would shake the history of Harvard’s architecture in succeeding years.²⁶

Like other campuses across the world, with the aftermath of the Second World War came a significant transformation in the architecture and planning of Harvard University. The neo-Georgian forms that had come to dominate the college were abandoned in favour of the International Style. This distinctive new flavour had much to do with the appointment to the faculty of the Graduate School of Design in 1937 of the modernist Walter Gropius. In 1949, Gropius received his first commission from the university to design a Graduate Centre. It was amongst the first pure examples of the International Style in the country, characterized by a continuous vocabulary of stark linearity, strip windows and rectangular, modular forms. Gropius was the first of a string of internationally renowned architects that the university was to employ in succeeding years. New building materials, styles, and scales were introduced into the Harvard topography and the placement of buildings became more a matter of pragmatism as land became scarce. Buildings of the period included the Undergraduate Sciences Centre. Designed by the firm of Josep Luis Sert in 1970, the lines and massings of the centre served to integrate the new structure to its North Yard setting. The eastern façade echoed the building line of immediate neighbour, the Gordon McKay Laboratory, while the southern façade responded to a newly-created mall next to it. This new green space was the result of the construction of a large vehicular underpass on Cambridge Street in 1966–1968, which created a pedestrian mall between the North Yard and Harvard Yard, a vast improvement in terms of both safety and aesthetics. So as not to overwhelm and destroy this green space, the Science Centre took the form of a stepped elevation rising from the mall from a single storey to a six-storey spine at its northern elevation.²⁷

Despite radically new forms, modern Harvard architecture has admirably sought to establish relationships with its predecessors. The spirit of Harvard’s historic architecture remains as dynamic in the South Yard’s newest dormitories, a graduate housing complex

designed by Kyu Sung Woo, completed 2008. The modest yet elegant design is a harmonious continuum of the River Houses. It has a river façade of brick, and a western low-rise elevation clad in wood in deference to neighbouring wooden frame, three-storey houses, while the layout reproduces the much-used Harvard motif of an open courtyard.

A pattern emerges within the chronology of Harvard’s development, that architects have accommodated their designs to educational requirements and objectives, but also to the campus’s earlier buildings, those structures distinguished by their dignity and venerability. These are the qualities with which the campus resonates, and it is much to do with Harvard’s largely avoiding attempts at ‘heroic’ architecture. The critic Montgomery Schuyler astutely commented in 1909 of Harvard’s architecture, ‘there is not in it, on the part of each succeeding builder, that itch to signalize his work by difference from that of his predecessors which is responsible for the chaotic miscellany of so many campuses. The characteristic is rather of deference than of difference.’²⁸ What makes the campus a successful unit is that it has eschewed the ‘grand statement’ in favour of a regard for its surroundings. An eclectic cross-section of colonial, Georgian, neo-classical, Gothic Revival, modernist and post-modernist buildings comprise the Harvard campus, yet the college is for the most part characterized by an enviable harmony. Building to a human-scale contributes much to this visual success. The majority of buildings are kept low, usually two- to five-storeys, and, in the case of the Yard and South Yard, are arranged to form courts. Such unity has not engendered monotony, for the skyline is punctuated by lively vertical elements – towers, spires, cupolas, engaging roof forms – that demarcate the buildings of special import within the bustling urban topography. Indeed, since its earliest years, Harvard has been involved in a complex dialogue with the city of Cambridge. It has contended with the constant challenge to create and preserve its green space as the university expanded and the urban mass encroached. Its open spaces, though, are what make the campus. The buildings frame the courtyards, quadrangles, and other open spaces that have come to form the archetypal image of the campus, which, for centuries, has nurtured an ever-strengthening affection for the university in those that pass through its gates.