Bricks Politics& What gets built at Harvard, what doesn’t, and why by Joan Wickersham very year, on a hot summer day, 10 Boston-area architects pile into a van together and drive around for hours looking for beauty. Lately, at least, they haven’t been finding it at Harvard. EThey are members of a jury assembled annually by the Boston Society of Architects to award the Harleston Parker Medal, a prize given to the recent building judged to be “the most beautiful.” It’s not the biggest, fanciest award in the world, or even in the world of architecture (that distinction belongs to the Pritzker Prize, sometimes referred to as “the Nobel of architecture”). But the Parker Medal is a good gauge of how architects—who are both the toughest critics and This elegant and austere office building for the Harvard University Library rose at greatest appreciators of one another’s work—view the aes- 90 Mount Auburn Street after the Cambridge Historical Commission rejected a design by Viennese architect Hans Hollein that would thetic quality of what’s being built around Boston. have been a bold, provocative piece of art that might have begun “a new kind of Since 2000, juries have recognized buildings on the Welles- architecture in Harvard Square.” 50 September - October 2007 Photographs by Jim Harrison ley campus twice, at Northeastern University twice, and at MIT York’s Morgan Library—was hired in 1999 to design a new mu- once. The last time a Harvard building was chosen was in 1994: seum for Harvard’s modern art collection. And Hollein, whose the Law School’s Hauser Hall, designed by Kallman McKinnell buildings in his native Vienna are described by design critics as and Wood. masterpieces of urban contextual architecture (the adjective The aim here is not to compare institutions in a ferocious, “jewel-like” comes up repeatedly) was asked to design a small competitive, why-hasn’t-America-won-more-gold-medals-in- building for the Harvard libraries. these-Olympics sort of way, but rather to point out that, for Ultimately, neither design was built. much of the twentieth century, Harvard was perceived as a Meanwhile other buildings, including Robert A.M. Stern’s leader in modern architecture, so the ab- neo-Georgian Spangler Center for the Business School, have en- sence of its newest buildings from the list of joyed smoother processes—though that building has also engen- what architects consider “most beautiful” is dered debate about architectural taste. As George Thrush, head surprising. of the architecture program at Northeastern, says, “There are Harvard’s modern architectural vision many problems a university can run into when it comes to get- began when Walter Gropius was brought in ting things built—and Harvard usually runs into all of them.” Peabody Terrace has always been admired by architects, but is generally to lead the architecture program at the Graduate School of Design No matter whom you talk to—architects, people within the (GSD) in 1937, and arguably reached its peak with the Carpenter University, Cambridge residents—three things are clear. First, Center, completed in 1963, the only building Le Corbusier ever de- there are a lot of fights about Harvard architecture. Second, signed in the United States. The campus also includes work by many of them aren’t really about architecture at all. And third, Alvar Aalto, Josep Lluis Sert, James Stirling, Robert Venturi, and they are won not by the group that makes the most persuasive Ben Thompson. Architects who studied or taught at the GSD— argument, but by the group that has the most leverage in the par- including I.M. Pei, Henry Cobb, Paul Rudolph, Philip Johnson, ticular situation. Hugh Stubbins, and Frank Gehry—have had an unparalleled im- pact on American architecture since World War II. Ada Louise The politics of site: Who gets to say what Huxtable, the former architecture critic for the New York Times, Harvard does with its land? wrote: “Harvard led an architectural revolution in the 1930s…that The defeat of the Renzo Piano art museum on the was virtually responsible in this country for the breakthrough for Charles River began 40 years before the museum itself was modern architecture” (see “The Forgotten Modernist,” page 58.) even conceived. So why isn’t Harvard still hiring amazing architects to design The parcel of land on which Harvard proposed to build the amazing buildings? museum was adjacent to Peabody Terrace, the complex of low- In fact, the University has tried. and high-rise buildings constructed in the 1960s to house gradu- During the past decade Harvard has given commissions to a ate students and their families. Designed by then GSD dean couple of architects who are not just well-regarded but generally Josep Lluis Sert, Peabody Terrace has always been admired by ar- revered: Renzo Piano and Hans Hollein, both of whom have won chitects (Leland Cott, an architect and a professor at the GSD, the Pritzker Prize. Piano, best known for his museum work— calls it “one of the world’s canonical housing projects”), but is the Pompidou Center in Paris, designed with Richard Rogers; generally disliked by those outside the profession, who find it the Menil Collection in Houston; and the recent addition to New cold and oversized. The neighbors hated it. The Riverside neighborhood was (and still is) a patchwork of small streets and modest clapboard houses. Peabody Ter- race’s three 22-story towers cast a long shadow, both literally and figuratively. For The towering years, front-yard fences Peabody Terrace in Riverside displayed, housing complex, alongside the climbing built in the 1960s, rises behind older roses, signs deploring housing of a far Harvard expansion. smaller scale. Riverside activist Saun- dra Graham (who went on to become a Massachusetts state repre- sentative) famously disrupted Harvard’s 1970 Commencement with a protest against further development. In 1999, James Cuno, then director of Har- vard’s art museums, announced plans to de- velop a piece of land next to Peabody Terrace that was owned by use the proposed museum site for University housing. It’s possi- Harvard and occupied for years by a popular nursery business. ble that external pressure from the neighbors accomplished Renzo Piano would design two new museums: one to house con- what internal politicking could not.) temporary art, and the other for ancient, Islamic, and Asian art. “Exhilarating,” one Riverside activist told the Globe in 2003, Piano’s design concept called for two-story wooden buildings vir- after the compromise was announced. But had the neighborhood tually hidden by a screen of trees. Boston Globe art critic Christine really benefited? Instead of a two-story museum in a park-like Temin wrote that when Piano showed her his plans, her response setting, they ended up with taller student dorms and a small was, “So where is it?” (See “Down by the Riverside: A Progress Re- public park adjacent to heavily traveled Memorial Drive. port,” May-June 2001, page 72, for images that the magazine has not Born suggests that what was at stake was more than just been given permission to reproduce here.) The balance of the site building heights, or even the symbolic David-and-Goliath drama would be used for University housing. of the neighbors versus the University, but also two opposing Observers called Piano’s design “bucolic” and “tactful”—but ideas of what constitutes the public good. “When I became a city Riverside neighbors, still angry about Peabody Terrace, petitioned councilor, there was controversy about a supermarket chain the Cambridge City Council to stop the project. “Neighborhoods wanting to build along the river. I thought the idea was ap- disliked by those outside the profession. The neighbors hated it. have enduring cultures,” says Kathleen Leahy Born, an architect palling, but you couldn’t argue for the who was a member of the council at the time. She remembers see- beauty of the river without sounding elitist. ing pen-and-ink sketches of the Piano project. “You couldn’t tell The Riverside group saw this supermarket much about it, but it was low. I thought it would have been a nice as food for poor people. So for them, defeat- and very fitting use of the land along the river.” The neighbors ing a museum and getting some units of were concerned about tra∞c, and proposed that the University a≠ordable housing is a victory of their defi- scrap the museum and use the site for a public park. That proposal nition of civic good.” In the opinion of Pebble Gi≠ord, a longtime recalled what had happened 25 years earlier when a citizens’ group Cambridge activist, “Those people don’t care about Renzo Piano, foiled plans to build the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum at they don’t give a damn who designs a museum down there. It’s the edge of Harvard Square. The I.M. Pei-designed project was not about architectural taste. It’s about ‘You already destroyed eventually sited at the University of Massachusetts, Boston cam- half our neighborhood, and now you want to destroy the other pus in Dorchester, and a park was built on the Harvard Square site half?’” For his part, Northeastern’s George Thrush—himself a instead, along with the Kennedy School of Government. Cambridge resident—points out that Harvard’s neighbors often The neighbors’ opposition to Piano’s museum also reflected fail to acknowledge the benefits of living near a large and thriv- their antipathy toward the new Harvard building that was going ing university: “Never have people whose property values have up directly across the river in Allston—a building Globe architec- risen so much complained so loudly.” ture critic Robert Campbell ’58, M.Arch.