|
May-June 2000
|
Advertising Supplement |
 |
| Naito Laboratory |
| Photo by Jim Harrison
|
For much of the 1990s, as the University determined to manage its properties better, much of the central campus appeared to be a great urban-renewal project. The dormitories in Harvard Yard were refurbished, and the ornate iron fence and gates surrounding them were reconditioned and completed. Sanders Theatre was gloriously restored. The old dining area of Memorial Hall was reborn as Annenberg, the dining commons for first-year undergraduates, and Loker Commons was carved out of the basement as a student center. Most recently, overhead, Katherine Bogdanovich Loker also provided essential funding for restoration of Memorial Hall's tower, a wedding cake of delicate copper crockets and polychrome slate. Last winter, venerable Divinity Hall was redone.
As these changes took place--and as the University Campaign provided new resources--major efforts began to adapt the use of other campus buildings, to accommodate changing academic priorities. The Freshman Union, Warren House, and Boylston Hall were gutted and transformed into Barker Center and its dependencies--regathering Arts and Sciences faculty members, graduate students, and undergraduate advisers in the humanities. The Medical School rebuilt a former Boston high school into the Harvard Institutes of Medicine research tower.
Comprehensive programs of library renovation and rewiring for new information technologies have remade the Law School's Langdell and the Medical School's Countway; the giant crane now towering over the Widener stacks signals the extensive work under way within; and comparable efforts are also planned for Lamont, the Divinity School's collections, and the Business School's Baker. In all, those projects represent a $200-million investment in Harvard's principal research libraries.
Some Things New
New buildings began to appear as well, as academic demands dictated and resources permitted. The School of Public Health expanded into its François-Xavier Bagnoud Building, which provided badly needed laboratory and office space on Huntington Avenue. The Business School, having created a striking chapel and a fitness complex earlier in the decade, launched campus expansion in the late 1990s with McArthur Hall (a high-rise dormitory for executive-education clients) and Spangler Center (a comprehensive student center). Murr Center, a new racquet facility, rose at the athletic complex, and a new artificial-turf playing field and tennis stadium were constructed (see page 81).
Across the Charles River, the Law School enclosed the northern end of Holmes Field with Hauser Hall--new faculty offices and classrooms. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences filled out its chemistry complex with the Naito Laboratory, and replaced the existing Aiken computer-sciences building with the Maxwell Dworkin building.
An Ambitious Agenda
Looking ahead, the factors propelling new construction appear likely to intensify. Collaborative interactions among faculty members--the rationale for Barker Center--are driving plans for new buildings meant to bring together scholars from the government department and international and regional centers (see page 66). New, technologically based teaching methods will be built into the Business School's Hawes classroom facility. And sweeping growth in scientific research necessitates expansion of laboratories to accommodate sensitive new equipment and swelling faculty ranks and research staffs. The Medical School is proceeding on a $300-million, 400,000-square-foot research center, and Arts and Sciences is completing plans for new life-sciences and physical-sciences laboratories, each likely to contain 40,000 square feet or more.
Capital spending on Harvard's physical plant totaled $160 million in the fiscal year ended June 30, 1999. Given the projects in advanced planning or already under construction, Harvard's spending on building and renovation could well exceed $1 billion over the next five years.
But all that may turn out to be only the prologue. For Harvard is looking to the academic use of the land it has acquired in Allston, beyond the Business School (see "South by North Harvard," September-October 1999, page 67). It is possible to envision a Harvard gateway to the new campus that may arise there in the coming decades. In Cambridge, on the Memorial Drive side of the river, discussions are under way about erecting a new University art museum. And back on the Allston side, across the Western Avenue bridge, at the corner of the Business School campus, Boston officials have expressed their enthusiasm for a high-rise graduate-student housing complex.
For the foreseeable future, then, dust and excavation will remain some part of every Harvard student's experience. For all one can tell, visitors to Commencement in 2050 will have to snake their way through that decade's chaotic reconstruction of downtown Boston's central highway and harbor tunnels to a still-growing, ever-changing Harvard campus.
