When the renovated Harvard Art Museums reopened in 2014, a Crimson sage disapproved of the boxy face it presents to Prescott Street. Why, he asked Primus, did the University hire stellar architects (in this case, Renzo Piano)—and then, in his opinion, get mediocre results? That led to musings about review committees’ deadening effects, design compromises, and other dark mutterings.
As Harvard nears a likely long pause in new edifices (fiscal constraints suggest a hiatus once the Allston theater complex and the new Cambridge home for the economics department are completed), it’s timely to consider which of the University’s commissions have measured up.
Sentimental votes might go to Charles Allerton Coolidge, A.B. 1881, and colleagues. As successors to the firm of H.H. Richardson, A.B. 1859, and then progenitors to the firm now known as Shepley Bulfinch, they were the house architects during A. Lawrence Lowell’s presidency. They created the beloved red brick, neo-Georgian everything: River Houses, Business School campus, and so on. But in succeeding decades, they segued to mid-century modern and the International Style: Lamont Library (1949); featureless boxes from Aiken Computation Center to the Mason Music Building (1972); and the gussied-up Leverett House towers (1960).
Harvard engaged a wider range of architects beginning in the late 1950s, when President Nathan M. Pusey’s capital campaign bankrolled a building bender. The University erected structures by starchitects Le Corbusier (Carpenter Center), Minoru Yamasaki (William James Hall), Hugh Stubbins (Loeb Drama Center, the Medical School’s Countway Library), and Philip Johnson ’30, B.Arch.’43 (Burden Hall).
Each has its merits, but Primus is inclined to award laurels to a different talent, Josep Lluís Sert—a judgment reinforced by Bainbridge Bunting and Margaret Henderson Floyd’s magisterial Harvard: An Architectural History (1985).
More than anyone else, the firm of Sert, Jackson and Gourley sensitively modernized the University. Their modest Center for the Study of World Religions (1960) at the Divinity School hardly prefigured the high-rise Harvard that followed: Peabody Terrace (1964); Holyoke Center (1964-1967, now the Smith Campus Center); and the Science Center (1973).
Each is huge, but their concrete exteriors defer to their neighborhoods’ fabric. The Science Center is stepped back, like the bellows of a Polaroid camera, deferring to Littauer Center and the magnificent Memorial Hall. Holyoke Center was built like a giant capital I, inset to lessen its impact on the narrow side streets. Each is identifiably a Sert project, with white vertical framing elements and dashes of red detailing that enliven their gray masses.
Most crucially, each project embraces passersby. A plaza and fountain soften the Science Center’s entry. Even after Holyoke’s modification into the Smith Center (dedicated in 2018), it maintains a sense of transparency similar to the Science Center’s. And Bunting and Floyd called Forbes Plaza, “with its benches and shade trees…an eddy, a refuge of just the right size to relieve the crowded, narrow sidewalks and automobile-clogged streets of Harvard Square.” Similarly, they wrote, Peabody Terrace is “masterful” in tying 21-story towers to their site with intermediate-sized structures laid out in an engaging pattern that “is never repetitious, never predictable.” Overall, Bunting and Floyd judged each program successful when built. They still are.
What was Sert’s secret? Born in Barcelona, he honed his aesthetics among his friends Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Alexander Calder. In Europe and later the United States (where he fled from fascism), he undertook many urban planning assignments. His Harvard designs melded taste, practicality, and sensitivity to context. It could not have hurt that Sert was, in effect, eating his own cooking: his campus projects coincided with his service as Graduate School of Design dean from 1953 to 1969.
It would be impossible to clone those ingredients today. But Sert’s work models what could be accomplished come Harvard’s next building boom—perhaps spurred by a quadricentennial campaign in 2036.
