Tozzer's transformation

Tozzer Anthropology Building (2014, Kennedy & Violich), Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Photo by Todd Larson.

Old Tozzer Library (1974, Johnson & Hotvedt), Photo courtesy of Flickr.

The recent bestowal of the Harleston Parker Medal / People's Choice Award on Harvard University's Tozzer Anthropology Building is thrilling news indeed. It is the apex of the long-overdue disposal of one of Harvard's most outmoded, poorly designed and badly illuminated buildings, that 1974 mound of modernism called Tozzer Library (left).

Entrance to Tozzer Library. Photo courtesy of the Cambridge Historical Commission.

I was contemptuous of that brick nothing-box mainly because I spent two miserable years there, on my first post-college job as the front-desk receptionist and lackey under the grumpiest of bosses. My menial tasks included sticking date-due slips and plates and labels on books, alphabetizing index cards, arranging six free library visits for outsiders, answering the same visitor queries about where the Peabody Museum, the MCZ [Museum of Comparative Zoology] Library, the bathroom, the Xerox machine, the nearest Centrex phone, etc., etc., were, and forever redirecting deliveries meant for the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology next door (below). 

Peabody Museum (1877, Robert H. Slack), Tozzer Library (1974, Johnson & Hotvedt)

Of course, the library's main entrance (above) fooled a lot of people into thinking the Peabody Museum was there, rather than in its distinctively Mansard-roofed Victorian brick next-door neighbor (left), which made its modern progeny look like a remnant of an industrial park by comparison.

And I'm sure you can see how the library externally expressed the boredom of my job (and my hostility toward visitors) with its nondescript exterior, clumsy massing, sparse fenestration, and awkward continuation of Divinity Avenue's streetscape, all of which gave no indication of how its interior was laid out, and looked as if its frontage was turning its back on the public – not a very kind architectural invitation inside. But I must say this: it contained one of the first wheelchair-accessible ramps (now a construction standard since the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990), but the ramp usurped the reception area, robbing it of vital seating/display space.

Interior of Tozzer Library. Photo courtesy of Verner Johnson.

Which may have cramped the rest of the interior as well. Here, the Phoenix seems to reach for more space than it is allotted to fly freely. It is hemmed in by the narrowness of its atrium and illuminated on one side only by a running clerestory; glaring fluorescent cove lighting has to make up for the deficit of natural light.

More to come...

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