BY PETER CATALANO
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 Sever Hall in Harvard's New Yard. Top: A statue of founder John Harvard.
At once comprising an insulated intellectual enclave and a lively civic space, the extensive grounds and many buildings of Harvard University reflect their own times, interact with an august past, and to some extent look to a hopeful future.
 hey come by spring, they come by fall. Caravans tromp through the rain, the snow, the heat. Their Mecca has no Medina. Their deity is built on a myth. Its holy lands are vast. This is Harvard.
The tourists' first stop is usually an imposing statue of John Harvard that presides over the university's most sacred precinct, Harvard Yard (now called the Old Yard). A minister who died young of consumption and left behind no record of his visage, Harvard is traditionally considered the founder of the university. In fact, however, the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature founded it as a college in 1636 and in the following year the college's Board of Overseers purchased a house and cow yard--hence "Yard"--as the site of the fledgling institution. John Harvard was, however, the college's first major benefactor. In 1638, the first year freshmen arrived (all nine of them), the late Harvard's will bequeathed his large library and half his estate to the college, which was soon named in his honor. In 1884, Daniel Chester French, who also created the statue of Lincoln in Washington, D.C.'s Lincoln Memorial, was given the commission for the bronze statue of John Harvard. Using as his model a young Harvard man named Sherman Hoar, he depicted the minister seated and gazing somberly forward, an open Bible on his lap. Photographs at his feet are, of course, obligatory. Touring pilgrims then move on, some of them venturing out of the Old Yard area.
Discerning eyes will be delighted. In the adjacent New Yard, Henry Hobson Richardson's Sever Hall is a genuine masterpiece of American architecture. Others who explore farther into the vast campus can't miss the hallucinogenically Gothic Memorial Hall; Le Corbusier's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts; Walter Gropius' workers-paradise dorms near the imposing Law School, the onion-domed Charles River campus dorms, or the puckish Lampoon clubhouse.
Harvard's hundreds of structures include masterpieces and clunkers as well as second-rate mediocrities designed by first-rate architects. Just seeing the university's holdings in Boston and Cambridge takes days; pondering them could be a lifetime's avocation. If nothing else, Harvard offers a highly entertaining visual potpourri. Naturally, the campus vista, with its quirky mix of styles, begs for interpretation, and there is no shortage of it.
Part of what a number of architectural historians do is figuratively put buildings on the psychiatrist's couch to render the inchoate stone into an explicit narrative. Architecture, it is argued, is a projection of the inner life of the mind, the collective unconscious of a community cast into three-dimensional form. Unfortunately, the floodplain of the psyche that lies behind the bricks only grudgingly yields its secrets. At best, its revelations are inferential.
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Memorial Hall, one of the finest examples of Ruskinian Gothic architecure in America.
Another tack is to examine how style melds with history. Edifice and context, broadly speaking, yield some degree of coherence. Harvard's architecture certainly cannot be separated from its 367-year history.
Harvard was envisioned from its founding to be both a society of scholars and an institution that would play a dynamic role in public life. This dualism is reflected in the Old Yard--and to varying degrees the entire campus--in that it is at once an insulated enclave and a civic space. Harvard Yard, the most sacred soil on campus, easily segues into Harvard Square, a retail and transportation nexus, and also the Cambridge Commons. The synergies are positive and reinforcing.
The Old Yard partly consists of an acre or so of the original college plot purchased in 1637. Today the Old Yard is venerated as the cradle not only of Harvard University but of all higher education in America. This reverence is of relatively modern vintage, however. There was nothing glamorous or sacred about the early yard. Basically it was a dump, with a foul-smelling pigpen adjacent to it. Rats fought with the university's herd of swine for slop, and the squeals of hogs being slaughtered regularly accompanied lectures.
John Thorton Kirkland, university president from 1810 to 1828, finally cleared the debris, had the mighty elms planted, and laid the elegant pathways. During the Kirkland years the Old Yard we know today began to take shape, but its dorm buildings held little allure to students, who preferred to lodge in private digs a few blocks away on Mt. Auburn Street, Harvard's "Gold Coast."
Setting the tone for the Old Yard are the university's oldest surviving structures: Massachusetts Hall (ca. 1719), Holden Chapel (1742), Hollis Hall ( 1762), and Harvard Hall (1764). The red brick found in these earliest structures is recapitulated almost universally throughout the campus, a leitmotif running through the university's vast and varied kingdom.
Holden Chapel is the gem among the older structures, sporting on a deep azure pediment above the entrance the coat of arms of donor Jane Holden (whose late husband had been a member of Parliament), surrounded by elaborate filigree in gleaming white plaster. So different from the unrelieved austerity of the buildings surrounding it, the High Georgian chapel with a touch of Baroque flamboyance in its pediment was long misattributed to some unknown London architect, or even Sir Christopher Wren. Most likely, however, Holden was designed by Boston designer John Smibert. When a more commodious chapel was built in 1766, Holden, with its high choir stalls making a good dissecting theater, achieved renown as the cradle of Harvard Medical School. Today it is the home of the Harvard Glee Club.
With Hollis and Harvard Hall, Holden forms a small quad off the Old Yard that remains one of the few authentic eighteenth-century remnants on campus. The mastermind behind making the Old Yard itself a defined quadrangle was America's first native-born professional architect, Charles Bulfinch. A Harvard alumnus, Bulfinch succeeded in reorienting the entrances of the main structures from the street inward to the yard. He also began the trend of filling in the yard's open edges to form a more enclosed quadrangle. His first architectural contribution was Stoughton Hall (1804), a building uncharacteristically frumpy for Bulfinch, as he was told to use the already frumpy Hollis Hall beside it as a model.
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Harvard's Widener Library.
Bulfinch's more noteworthy contribution came under Kirkland's visionary tenure, with the erection of University Hall in 1813--14. This gray granite building, contrasting dramatically with the red brick of all the other buildings on the quadrangle's perimeter, had the effect of both defining and unifying the Old Yard, due largely to its placement. Standing directly opposite the main entrance to the campus, in the middle of a long side of the rectangular yard, the classical edifice imparts a sense of dignity and solemnity, and the visitor feels he has arrived at the campus's heart. Two other notable buildings on the Old Yard (which altogether has ten buildings along its borders) are from the Victorian era. Matthews Hall (1872), in a style dubbed Ruskinian after the eccentric, rabidly anti-industrial English art critic, has steep gables, Gothic porches, and granite trim with distinctive stone carving. Weld Hall (1873), in contrast, is rather Queen Anne in feeling, with graceful large Jacobean gables and two rooftop clerestory towers.
Turning Point
 niversity Hall bridges the Old Yard and the New Yard beyond, with welcoming entrances on both sides of the building. If the Old Yard was planted in the eighteenth century, the New Yard was solidly rooted in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
By the mid-nineteenth century, Harvard had become a stagnant institution, just one of many New England colleges. The arrival of Charles W. Eliot as Harvard's president in 1869 marked a major turning point, not only for the university but for American higher education. Sweeping away the classical curriculum, introducing graduate schools, recruiting a far more meritocratic student body, and installing a bevy of European academics, Eliot--who served as university president until 1909--set the pace for modern collegiate America. In 1873 he made the college a university with the award of the first doctorate. By the 1880s Harvard had become "Harvard."
Eliot's reign was marked by large territorial expansion and the construction of a number of architectural gems. The most dazzling among them has to be Memorial Hall (1870--78), a secular cathedral honoring the Union Civil War dead affiliated with the university. In 1865, a group of alumni determined to create a suitable memorial that would at once commemorate fallen alumni and provide halls for special college events. An architectural competition was launched, and the winners were Harvard graduates William Robert Ware and Henry Van Brunt. The monumental cross-shaped structure, with its brick exterior, polychromed roof tiles, thousands of ornamental details, and mammoth central tower, is now widely regarded one of the greatest Ruskinian Gothic buildings outside of England. Within a generation of its completion, however, it was considered embarrassingly out of fashion, and in succeeding decades it fell into shabby condition. The top portion of the four-sided tower--which had been altered in 1897 to house large clocks facing in each direction--burned down in 1956, and wasn't returned to its original glory until 1999. Other restorations in the mid-1990s made Memorial Hall once again a centerpiece of Harvard life.
Inside, at the transept of the building, is the large cathedral-like memorial space, with a high wooden Gothic vault and marble tablets affixed to the walls bearing the names of 136 Harvard graduates and students who died for the Union cause, including the grandson of Paul Revere. (Those alumni who died fighting for the Confederacy are not commemorated.) One wing of the building houses an immense banqueting hall, now called Annenberg Hall, with impressive hammer-beam trusses, walnut paneling, and stained-glass windows. In the other half of the structure is an exceedingly fine concert and lecture hall, Sanders Theater. With renowned acoustics and an intimate 180-degree design, Sanders is not just an auditorium; it is a civic space that has given many fond memories to the entire Greater Boston community. Throughout the building, numerous stained-glass windows offer a veritable museum of American stained glass, including works by John La Farge, Sarah Wyman Whitman, and Tiffany Studios.
Memorial Hall's finishing touch is an irregular, polychromatic tiling scheme on the steep roof, turrets, and high tower. Alternating horizontal bands of yellow, blue, and orange roof tiles make for an almost psychedelic effect. Intersecting, ever-rising lines of Gothic windows, gables, transept steeples, and the high tower, all crowned with bands of vibrating color, give the impression of a cathedral in motion and about to ascend into the heavens. Seen against a clear blue sky, Memorial Hall is undeniably the boldest edifice on any American campus.
Eliot's tenure also saw the expansion of the New Yard. Bulfinch's University Hall became the administrative center in Eliot's Harvard. The other landmarks here are Sever Hall (1878), Widener Library (1913--15), and Memorial Church (1931), the latter two dating from the post-Eliot era.
The most majestic structure in the New Yard, or anywhere else in the kingdom, for that matter, is Sever Hall. With Memorial Hall, it shares the prize for elegance. Upon its dedication Sever immediately became the artistic centerpiece for the New Yard, which would eventually be filled in as a quadrangle mirroring the Old Yard on the other side of University Hall. Sever's designer, Harvard alumnus H.H. Richardson, was the New Yard's answer to Charles Bulfinch and his transformation of the Old Yard.
Richardson was a major representative of Romanticism in American architecture, but whereas many of his contemporaries espoused some form of Gothic Revival, he looked back to Romanesque architecture for inspiration. His highly personal take on it became known as Richardson Romanesque and influenced many younger architects throughout the nation. In Sever Hall, aside from using the ubiquitous red brick of the Old Yard, he cast few glances back to the Colonial-era college. Instead, the monumental Sever welcomes visitors with a central Syrian arch, above which is a two-story bump-out surmounted by a Greek pediment. The pediment as well as friezes on the building display ornately carved and molded brickwork, rich yet subdued. Modern architect Rafael Moneo has commented that in Sever, "Richardson wanted to demonstrate that ornament is not something aggregated or applied, but instead is capable of sharing in the substance--the very matter--of the building itself." On either side of the central portal, about halfway to the ends of the building, round turrets with carvings and pointed caps add flair. Massive, highly sloped dark red tile roofing finishes off this architectural masterpiece.
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Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, the only building in North America designed by Le Corbusier.
University Hall and Sever run parallel to each other, forming two sides of the New Yard, while Widener Library and Memorial Church form the others. The university's main library, Widener is among the most massive of Neoclassical designs. The architect, John McConnell, commented that when Widener Library was conceived, "Harvard was looking around for an empire to imitate. Rome seemed like the best idea." Indeed, with its entrance fronted by a dozen heavy Corinthian columns and a long flight of steps, with a token display of red bricks banding the top of the facade, Widener casts a cold imperial eye upon the New Yard.
Staring back a bit more gracefully is Memorial Church. As Harvard was the first college in the United States to drop mandatory chapel (in Eliot's regime), this building is less a seat of devotion than a sort of glorified meetinghouse. Its greatest merit is a soaring, gleaming white steeple, almost an exact replica of the one on Boston's Old North Church (of Paul Revere fame). For some time it was the highest steeple at the university, conceived to be seen from the Charles River. Designed by Bulfinch's successor firm in Boston, Memorial Church is otherwise a stylistic farrago. Wide, stubby Greek columns at its entrance noticeably taper to support a simple pediment, and the rest of the structure is in an unpretentious meetinghouse style. The combination is gauche, not bold and elegant.
The imperial style was not confined to the New Yard. Roman Empire seems mingled with "Prussian Lugubrious" at Langddell Hall (1928), headquarters of Harvard Law School. Its sixteen Ionic pillars are more imposing than welcoming: the effect is stern and chilly, remote and patrician in all the worst senses.
International Style
 n time, imperialism of one sort gave way to another. In 1937, university president James Conant invited Walter Gropius, the exiled architect and teacher of Bauhaus fame, to head Harvard's architecture school. At war's end, Gropius and his firm, the Architects Collaborative, designed the Harkness Graduate Center (1952) near the Law School. Harvard tourist texts flaunt this as a work of immense importance to the history of American architecture, as it is the first major collegiate landmark in the International Style in the United States. Looking at the center's now rather seedy structures, however, it's hard to appreciate this assessment. The seven low-lying, stark residence halls and covered walkways with painted pipes for supporting pillars have a chintzy utilitarian feel characteristic of utopian-egalitarian buildings in the former East Germany. The center's most redeeming features are grass courtyards filled with scintillating sculptures by Joan Mir—, Jean Arp, and Joseph Albers, among others.
Harkness was the first in a line of gestures to the Internationalist modern school that includes Le Corbusier's Carpenter Center for Visual Studies (1959--61); Jos‚ Sert's colorfully dysfunctional Science Center (1970--72); and William James Hall (1963), a fifteen-story box-tower housing the social sciences by Minoru Yamasaki (of World Trade Center fame). All of these are more or less failures on aesthetic and even functional grounds.
Sert's Science Center, but a few yards from the Annenberg Hall segment of Memorial Hall, is, if nothing else, audacious. Its innovative materials include epoxies, resins, and coatings that were unfortunately not thoroughly tested for New England's harsh climatic conditions. Falling ice once burst through an atrium, now half-covered by nauseating lime panels. With its colors fading, the Science Center looks mangy. It is hugely expensive to operate and maintain, and its style can only be called Parking Garage Bunker, with oppressive interiors full of raw castings and exposed ductwork. The Harvard Science Center is, in short, a botched experiment. Only the 1985 Tanner Fountain adds a picaresque touch. Resembling a sauna cairn, it sprays clouds of steam in cold weather and a refreshing mist in the summer.
Le Corbusier's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts breaks no new ground for the designer, it's chief merit being that it is the only edifice in the United States credited to the French icon. By all accounts, the Carpenter Center was a mail-in job. Stopping by Cambridge for a few days, Le Corbusier ignored the site's surroundings, noting only its size. "Such a small commission from such a large country," he commented. He didn't even know where the main entrance was to be located, so anyone approaching from Quincy Street has to enter the building through the basement. Its winding ramp and boxy concrete walls have grown dark and dank.
That said, the bracingly stark, clean lines and primal geometric forms along Quincy Street resemble a giant slalom that crests on the creamy white penthouse of William James Hall. It's a peculiar sight that the eye can grow fond of, even if the buildings, individually, are hard to embrace.
Few structures from the 1980s offer much appeal, and many are downright clumsy. The Kennedy School of Government, facing the Charles River, is a mass of squat brick bunkers. Across the Charles, Philip Johnson's Burden Hall (1968) and Ben Thompson's 1974 Soldier's Field apartments offer variants on the unambitious.
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The Maxwell-Dworkin Computational Center, a 1990s building that puts a postmodern spin on Harvard's signature red brick.
Some handsome structures were erected during the last fifteen years. Hauser Hall is a well-crafted postmodern building that opened in 1993. Its design, drafted by Boston's Kallmann, McKinnell & Wood, combines many geometric elements in a contemporary homage to Richardson. Its Syrian entrance is reminiscent of Sever Hall, punctuated by a cantilevered roof. A transitional element on the side, rising higher than the front, leads to a bowed, convex back that gently extends into the shallow ellipse of Harkness Commons. Hauser is thoughtful, elegant, and cleanly imaginative.
So is the Maxwell-Dworkin Computational Center (1999, by Payette Associates), located near Hauser. This prismatic structure of brick and glass is sensitive to more staid neighbors in Holmes Quadrangle but reminds visitors that Harvard is a world-class center of science and technology. With Hauser and Maxwell-Dworkin, the university has struck the delicate balance between restraint, imagination, and historical deference.
That may change, however. As the campus expands into the Allston section of Boston across the Charles River with the relocation of the prestigious law school, there might be a revival of the imperial architectural stare. With Lawrence Summers--not known for modesty when he was secretary of the U.S. Treasury--as its new president, Harvard may again embrace the monumental. It would not be out of step with the times.
Peter Catalano writes on the arts from Boston.
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