Tozzer's transformation

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

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 (above) is thrilling news. It is the apex of the long-time-coming renewal of one of Harvard's most outmoded, poorly designed, badly lit 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 bland brick nothing-box, mainly because I had spent two miserable years there on my first post-college job as a front-desk receptionist and stooge under the most grumpy and bored of bosses. My menial tasks (about which he often teased me about how un-challenging they were) included sticking date-due slips and plates and labels on books, alphabetizing index cards, filling out commercial bindery request slips for new book acquisitions, checking out books and collecting fines for overdue ones from patrons, arranging six free library visits for outsiders, fetching books and senior honors theses for students and profs, answering the same old 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 that was the Peabody Museum, rather than 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.

Tozzer Library (1974, Johnson & Hotvedt), Harvard University.

Which was a shame, considering that one of its architects was E. Verner Johnson, eminent designer of more than 200 museums, from the MIT Museum to the Smithsonian Institution's Arts & Industries Building to an expansion of Boston's Museum of Science. His "museum touch" was sadly absent from this Peabody Museum extension; its replacement is far more museum-like in its form.

And I'm sure you can see how the library externally expressed the ennui of my job (and my hostility toward visitors) with its nondescript exterior, clumsy massing, erratic and sparse fenestration, and awkward continuation of Divinity Avenue's streetscape, all of which made it seem to turn 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 (which has been a construction standard since the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990). However, the crisscrossing ramp usurped the reception area, robbing it of vital space for seating, socializing, and art displays.

Interior of Tozzer Library. Photo courtesy of E. Verner Johnson.

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

Study area in Tozzer Library. Photo courtesy of William M.C. Lam.

In Perception and Lighting as Formgivers for Architecture (1977), William M.C. Lam explained his lighting of the library: "The book stacks were oriented perpendicular to the long axis of the coffers so that the books would 'see' the brightest portion of the ceiling."

Study area in Tozzer Library. Photo courtesy of William M.C. Lam.

And so did its patrons – too much. The ceiling's brightness permeated the atmosphere with an antiseptic, hospital-like glare that made users miss the warm glow of the natural sunlight, incandescent lighting, and even candlelight Harvard's older buildings had depended on to shed light on the work of its students, professors and visiting scholars.

Offices and study rooms suffered from the same. Lam wrote, "Track lighting [provides] supplementary task illumination when the larger coffers are subdivided to form small offices [left]. Local lighting is built into each carrel [right]." Which were fine for administration and studies, but did not amount to a very welcoming work or study environment. The clean lines, cove-lit ceiling, off-white palette, and industrial uniformity of the finish materials suggested the absence of something – which certainly contributed to my ho-hum there.

Reception area, Tozzer Anthropology Building, Harvard (2014, Kennedy & Violich Architects). Photos by John Horner.

This is the reception I would have preferred to be greeted with every morning. It's spacious, fluid, comfortable, clear in its direction to other parts of the building, softly hued and shaded, brightly illuminated by sun, and very conducive to stopping to study, socialize, or gaze at the displays. In fact, the two-story Mayan stela, once nestled in a tight corner at the base of the old Tozzer Library's entry ramp, is now given more room to assert its historical identity and beauty, presenting the Tozzer Anthropology Building as one of the world's most renowned repositories of anthropological, archaeological and ethnological artifacts, scholarship and records.

Atrium/lightwell, Tozzer Anthropology Building, Harvard (2014, Kennedy & Violich Architects). Photo by John Horner.

Atrium lounge, Tozzer Anthropology Building. Photo by John Horner.

Copious, opulent sunlight cascades from a far-reaching skylight, blessing studies or lounging with the radiance of nature as an enlightening stimulus, and leaving a fiery glow upon the birch panels, expressing the sun and nature dependency of ancient cultures. Rafters cast diagonal shadows on the woodwork, adding to the angular drama. The old library's cubic confines couldn't present patrons with such a soaring spectacle. The running balcony corridor invites faculty and workers from all corners to partake of this wonder, unlike the "siloing" in the old library.

Peabody Museum and Tozzer Anthropology Building, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Photo by John Horner.

What accounts for this wonder? The building's polygonal form, suggesting a prehistoric artifact or ziggurat. The copper-paneled hip roof's angled top creates the diagonal skylight that suns the study lounge, while complementing the Peabody's old roof gables – which Tozzer Library's flat, low roof certainly couldn't do.

Entrance to Tozzer. Photo by John Horner.

The quirky entrance, diapered in patterned brickwork to evoke the spirit of ancient masonry, gives us the sense of entering a cave for an archaeological discovery, while creating engagingly angled light-and-shadow patterns when the sun hits it.

This is a much more enticing, intimate entry into the wonderland of anthropology, archaeology and ethnology than Tozzer Library's blandly square, spatially cumbersome entrance was, which was little different from entering a corporation in a suburban office park every morning. Now we enter an academic/artistic realm, and the relatively small entry door, framed by the angular lines of crafted brick, piques our fascination about the knowledge and culture that lie within.

Tozzer Anthropology Building (2014, Kennedy & Violich Architecture), Harvard University. Photo by Shelley Zatsky.

The unusual rhythm of fenestration on the front and rear facades adds to the playfulness that was sorely lacking in the old library's square sobriety. The variation of window placement among the levels complements the skew diagonals of the skylight roof and entrance, giving the building a sculptural street presence that complements the archaeological stonework on display inside the building and on its grounds. Furthermore, the windows protrude, rather than recede, from their façade, which suggests that the building is bursting with anthropological activity and sunny, sumptuous study space, unlike the boxed-in feeling Tozzer Library gave its workers and patrons.

Tozzer Anthropology Building (2014, Kennedy & Violich Architecture), rear, by the Peabody Museum, Harvard University.

Peabody Museum, Tozzer Anthropology Building entry. Photo by Nicholas Ruhland.

Tozzer Library and the Tozzer Anthropology Building demonstrate how architecture can foster a community and symbolize its academic goals, in the latter case, and can distance its users and spaces from one another and reduce them to do-the-job utility, in the former. Even the ramp distanced the library from the museum, relegating us library staff to the dull side of the tracks. 

Peabody Museum (1877), Tozzer Anthropology Building (2014).

Tozzer entrance sign. Photo by Kent Borg.

The new Tozzer – a finalist for the actual Harleston Parker Medal in 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2025 – unifies Harvard's anthropology, archaeology and ethnology departments and their library into a coherent entity, blended internally by atrium light and fluid circulatory spaces and externally by artful brickwork and regular rhythms of fenestration along Divinity Avenue and in the rear courtyard it shares with the museum. This goes beyond thinking outside the box and correcting a big mistake made by an architect who should have stuck to museums. It bridges the Peabody Museum and its new neighbor into the centrally coherent center for studies and exhibits of ancient cultures Harvard needed all along — as did I.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

Lam, William M.C., Perception and Lighting as Formgivers for Architecture, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977, https://archive.org/details/perceptionlighti0000lamw

"Tozzer Anthropology Building," AIA New York, https://www.aiany.org/architecture/featured-projects/view/tozzer-anthropology-building/

"Tozzer Anthropology Building – BSA Design Awards," Boston Society for Architecture, https://www.architects.org

"Tozzer Anthropology Building / Kennedy & Violich Architecture," ArchDaily, 2014, https://www.archdaily.com/772590/tozzer-anthropology-building-kennedy-and-violich-architecture

"Tozzer Anthropology Building / Kennedy & Violich Architecture," BrickArchitecture, https://brickarchitecture.com/projects/tozzer-anthropology-building-kennedy-violich-architecture

"U.S. Building of the Week: Tozzer Anthropology Building," world-architects.com, May 8, 2017, https://world-architects.com/en/architecture-news/building-of-the-week/tozzer-anthropology-building

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...

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!