The 'hills' of Harvard

(L-R) Science Center, Memorial Hall, Gund Hall, Adolphus Busch Hall; Art Museums in foreground. Photo by Nick Allen (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Memorial Hall (1870-77, Ware & Van Brunt), Gund Hall (1972, John Andrews), Harvard University.

Brick and stone historicism has clearly predominated Harvard University's architectural history as the gold (or crimson) standard for campus construction, save for sporadic breaches of this tradition when the midcentury/ millennial modernism of reinforced concrete, steel framing, window walls and skylights became fashionable according to what school of thought was governing the Graduate School of Design or the Building Committee's impulses.

Science Center (1972-73, Josep Lluis Sert), Harvard University.

Adolphus Busch Hall, (1912-1921, German Bestelmeyer), Harvard University.

Yet I recently noticed a common thread among the stylistic diversity these traditions and their disruptions produced: a "hill" building technique that clustered and stacked an edifice like a pyramid, directing the eye upward to a summit of one kind or another. 

In so doing, each of these "hills" articulates and distinguishes its individual parts and "divisions" on its exterior, cluing us in to the multiple uses the building was assigned as we optically mount to its summit. Though that is a common characteristic of modern architecture ("form follows function," in Louis Sullivan's words), some of Harvard's historical styles had already adapted that practice as early as the mid-19th century.

Photo by chensiyuan (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Initiating this building-bulking approach to Harvard's campus expansion was Memorial Hall, built in 1870-77 from a High Victorian Gothic design by William Robert Ware and Henry Van Brunt in memory of Harvard alumni who sacrificed their lives in defense of the Union in the Civil War. The building's diversified massing denotes its multiple functions, which Henry James described in The Bostonians (1885-86) as:

...three main divisions: one of them a theater, for academic ceremonies; another a vast refectory, covered with a timbered roof, hung about with portraits and lighted by stained windows, like the halls of the colleges of Oxford; and the third, the most interesting, a chamber high, dim and severe, consecrated to the sons of the university who fell in the long Civil War.

Sanders Theatre, Memorial Hall. Photo by Bestbudbrian (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The first "division" is Sanders Theatre. Modeled on Christopher Wren's Sheldonian Theatre (1664-1669) at Oxford, Sanders adapts the in-the-round configuration of Rome's Theatre of Marcellus of the 1st century B.C. and Shakespeare's Globe Theatre of 1614, with wood-encased iron ties elegantly opening the space to all present.

Sanders' rotund room is externally expressed as a basilica articulates its rounded apse. The mansard roof with "streaky bacon" slate tilework shapes the soar of the ceiling, hence the resonance of the acoustics. Busts of orators Demosthenes, Cicero, John Chrysostom, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, Edmund Burke, and Daniel Webster adorn the semicircle of lancet-arched dormer gables.

Annenberg Hall, Memorial Hall. Photo by Bestbudbrian (CC BY-SA 4.0).

James' second "division" is Annenberg Hall, a dining hall paralleling the majesty of the nave of a Gothic cathedral. Curving hammerbeam rafters with quatrefoil cutouts uphold the mansard roof's soaring structure and inject the space with awe-inspiring drama, ecclesiastically enriched by stained-glass windows and grand chandeliers.

Photo by P.K. Nelson (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Stained-glass windows, brick buttresses, and a mountainous gable continuing the streaky-bacon slate work articulate Annenberg as a dignified space to enjoy a feast for the eyes as well as the stomach. A cloister with Gothic-arched side entries on either side presents a welcoming, open-ended "porch" to the main attraction, as a narthex introduces a church.

Photo by pundit (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The final "division" is the visually elaborate central portion, crowned by the landmark copper-finial-adorned bell tower and bookended by pairs of peaked turrets flanking stained-glass-window-surmounted entrances. This signifies the space with the highest level of architectural ceremony and social remembrance, the Memorial Transept. In this cross-space that comprises the horizontal segment of the Latin cross Memorial Hall forms as a whole, ribbed vaulting, lancet arches, marble plaques and floors, stained-glass windows, monumental chandeliers, and carved woodwork combine to visually impel us to pay respect to those who perished in the United States' most divisive, decisive war, with the solemnity of the most sacred of Gothic cathedrals.

Repurposing Memorial Hall's pyramidal schemata and tripartite division in a Germanic context is Adolphus Busch Hall, built in 1921 from a design by a Dresden architect whose name reveals the style: German Bestelmeyer.

From a stacked central clock tower splays out diverse wings and ells denoting diverse art collections in what was originally called the Germanic Museum. All are unified by a stucco finish that breaks with Harvard's brick tradition as a forerunner to the gray-beige concrete of its modernist structures. Maintaining the building's historical integrity are a terra cotta tile roof, classical balustrades, and the tri-level clock tower that gives it the landmark dignity of a Rathaus or Gaswerk in a German town.

The hall was originally designed to house collections and reproductions of German art from the country's Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance periods, as indicated by the triumvirate aggregate of wings and ells and the interior's off-white stonework and muted classicism, which casts off stylistic pretensions to let the art run the show. Since the collections have been consolidated in the Harvard Art Museums, Adolphus Busch Hall is today a popular rental venue that adds a Teutonic touch to weddings, banquets, cocktail parties and other private functions. 

Dunster House (1930, Charles Coolidge), Harvard University. Photo by Vadivel Ramasamy.

Dunster House, one of Harvard's twelve undergraduate residential houses built in the 1930s along the Charles River under then President Abbott Lawrence Lowell's House Plan, is the most imaginative of the houses. Architect Charles Coolidge had a tight triangular site to work with, which he elegantly symbolized in the prevalence of triangular pediments amid the parts and their pyramidal hillock rise toward the central bell tower. This was modeled on Christopher Wren's Tom Tower of Christ Church, Oxford (1681-82), with a more Georgian than Gothic slant, for Harvard tradition's sake.

Dunster articulates its individual parts forthrightly, as a residential village providing 475 undergrads and 25 staff members with a dining hall, a library, music practice rooms, an art studio, a student kitchen and grille, a gym and squash court, and a smart classroom.

George Gund Hall broke the rules. By building from the inside out and expressing its structure as sculptural form, Harvard Graduate School of Design alumnus John Andrews was determined to make his school's new home exemplary of the Corbusian concrete brutalism and the steel-and-glass framework of the International Style that were trendy in 1972.

Photo by Bobak Ha'Eri (CC BY 3.0).

Yet, in doing so, the building preserved its predecessors' essentials: the triangular bent that shaped Dunster Hall, the light grayness that made Adolphus Busch Hall deviate from Harvard's crimson-brick norm, the ceiling-beam exposure of Memorial Hall, and the "hilliness" of all three, but with more of a steep 

incline this time, in the form of steps and levels of "trays" of drafting tables for students to complete their projects under the luminar purity of skylights, with the bare-bones expression of the roof-rafter structure constantly hovering over their heads to remind them of the architectonic principles they had to focus on in the modern age of design.

Such honest structural expression allowed Gund Hall to expand Memorial Hall's "porch" and "cloister" to new heights and breadths with the use of pilotis, or cylindrical concrete columns, as load-bearing elements. This formed a broad, deep verandah that gave as much exposure to the building's progenitor — Memorial Hall — across the street as it did to Gund's structure internally.

Photo by Gunnar Klack (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Structural sincerity stretches sky-high at the Science Center (1972-73), a daringly defiant mammoth of modernism that delineates its parts to the point of discord among them. In doing so, architect Josep Lluis Sert — then dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design — extolled the scientific advancements taught inside by expressing them the form of advanced engineering and construction, clustering and stepping them as a jumbled pile to represent the ongoing growth and progress of science — in essence, the scientific method, and the erratic process of constant discovery, articulated by exposing the architectonic method of the building's construction.

The "spider" of angled roof-girders crowns the lecture hall with an entomological reference that proclaims the building's scientific use monumentally — and a handsome pair of "hills" the ziggurat and spider doth make.

The stepped semi-ziggurat provides a setback to avoid casting a skyscraper's shadow on the plaza. This gives the building a sculptural presence like that of El Castillo at Chichen Itza in Mexico (below). 

El Castillo, Chichen Itza, Mexico (8th–12th c. AD). Photo by Alastair Rae (CC BY-SA 2.0).

This is how the Science Center respectfully defers to Memorial Hall as Gund Hall did: by lessening its bulk so it won't block Memorial's majestic view. The ziggurat also pays respect to its surroundings by grounding itself as a one-story lecture-hall pavilion, inviting students inside on a human scale...

...only to soar beyond that scale to awestrike its occupants with "a magnificent Piranesi-like interior with the volume of Boston's Symphony Hall," as Bainbridge Bunting and Margaret Henderson Floyd put it in Harvard: An Architectural History. This Piranesian symphony is rife with spatial expressions of the far-reaching dimensions of science: skylit atria, suspended staircases, balcony overlooks, endless corridors, and more labyrinthine adventures through space and light. This web of wonder creates a network of hills, plateaus and valleys that visually prepare us for the adventures through science students and faculty are about to experience in this cosmos of classrooms, labs, lecture halls, offices, a library, and various landing places for relaxation, phone-recharing and laptop travail.

Chain of Life (1996) by John Robinson. Photo by Charles Ling.

Olivetti Showroom Wall Relief (1954) sandscape by Constantino Nivola. Photo by Sarah C.

Picking up on the art-display tradition of Memorial Hall and the Germanic Museum, the Science Center has some of its own, including John Robinson's Chain of Life (1996), an atrium-suspended mobile depicting the compound of two carbon atoms (black), one nitrogen atom (green), one oxygen atom (blue) and two hydrogen atoms (chrome) that theoretically made life on earth possible; and Constantino Nivola's sandscape Olivetti Showroom Wall Relief (1954), transported from the New York City display room of the Olivetti typewriter company as a bas-relief mural of whimsical abstraction to add more life to the Science Center's antiseptic modernism.

More to come...

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Welcome to ArchiTalk!

First, a little about myself. I've been an architecture buff off and on since childhood. I credit my architectural appreciation to my father, the late Leslie Larson, who was an architect in the Frank Lloyd Wright genre with Japanese and Scandinavian influences thrown in. He designed warm-wooded, soft-lit, clean-lined homes, apartments and offices for such figures as Tony Bennett, Norman Cousins, David Rockefeller, million-dollar corporate attorney Martin Lipton, and renowned psychologist Eric T. Carlson. When we moved from New York to Boston, my father became a consultant on renovations of historic properties. His magnum opus in both departments was Maison Robert, an upscale French bistro he designed as part of the adaptive reuse of Boston's Old City Hall. (The restaurant closed in 2004, and Ruth's Chris Steak House now occupies its space.)

But I really become a captive fan (fan-atic, I might say) of architecture in recent years, ever since reading Paul Goldberger's 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning book On the Rise and being awestruck by the precision of his prose and the art of his "architext." I went on to study architecture history and theory at Harvard and Boston Architectural College, and to write about architecture for numerous publications, most recently "Home of the Week" profiles in the Executive Domains section of the Boston Business Journal. Prior to that I was doing the same for the Wellesley Townsman and the Needham Times, until budget cuts demolished that part of my job (and I eventually got laid off). In fact, I've amassed quite a paper trail, having also written for the Cambridge Chronicle, the TAB, the Improper Bostonian, Boston Homes, Banker & Tradesman, the Boston Business Journal, MassBuilder, Greater Boston Builder, and Victorian Homes, among others.

Now I'm frantically chasing after freelance gigs to build that portfolio further up, and I thought getting an architectural blog going would keep me writing away until the mags, papers and journals began to come my way again, and help me generate some story ideas. I was also eager to share my love of architecture with the world, and I thought a blog would be the most inviting, least intrusive way to do so, after ruling out an e-newsletter as too spammish and a paper pub as too spendthrifty.

So I hope you enjoy my blog and gain some new insights and hindsights (and lose some oversights) into the ins, outs, ups, downs, back alleys, side streets and front lawns of the architectural space that surrounds, astounds and hounds you, where there's always so much to see, spot, observe, learn, discover, find out, unturn, unravel, unveil, uncover, unearth, and stare you in the face. For architecture is the world we live in, really, so we might as well revel in it while we're still here, no?

The adventure begins...

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!