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May-June 2002
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Building Momentum |
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| Make way for grad students: New housing rises in Allston. |
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| Make way for computers: the new information-sciences building. |
Recent small-scale new buildings set the tone for the infilling and reuse of University land now in prospect campuswide in the twenty-first century. FAS's Maxwell-Dworkin computer-sciences building, for instance, replaced the Aiken Laboratory, which was razed. The Naito chemistry facility has connected the Mallinckrodt and Converse Laboratories. Now the Bauer Laboratory, dedicated in March to house genomics research (see "Steel and Skin"), squares the circle, joining the expanded chemistry complex and linking it to the Fairchild biochemistry facilities in an integrated center for related sciences—and, in the process, enclosing a handsome new landscaped quadrangle. The result is to update existing sites and build academic bridges without significantly altering the scale of the familiar facilities—upgrading utility and aesthetics at the same time.
Those strategies are about to be cloned, albeit on a more ambitious scale.
* Replacement. Assuming permission is granted by Cambridge (the decision was pending as this issue went to press), the long-planned Center for Government and International Studies, spanning Cambridge Street, will take the place of two existing buildings (Coolidge Hall and the office of University Information Systems). Of the 160,000 square feet or so of newly constructed space, a significant portion will be placed underground, an increasingly common, if expensive, tactic in Harvard's plans.
* Infilling. FAS faces a space crunch throughout its science departments. Among the facilities furthest along in planning is a substantial new physical-sciences building to be sited between Cruft and McKay Laboratories, again completing a science quadrangle (this one facing Oxford Street, across from the Museum of Comparative Zoology). To minimize vibration, much of the sensitive equipment envisioned for use by the Center for Imaging and Mesoscale Structures will be in fortified, heavy construction below grade. A smaller, special-use project—a "vivarium" for transgenic mice used in biological research—is on a fast track, with construction set to begin perhaps as soon as this summer, entirely underground, beneath the existing Biological Laboratories courtyard.
* Infilling, replacement, and undergrounding. All these strategies, and more, will come into play in FAS's most ambitious program: its planned "North Precinct" science complex (see page 54). Conceptual planning for the area north of the MCZ suggests that Divinity Avenue could be extended and the cyclotron and associated buildings demolished or relocated, thereby making room for several laboratory-dependent science departments. FAS appears to need at least a few hundred thousand square feet of labs soon. An agreement with the neighbors to the north, along Hammond Street, has committed Harvard to low-rise construction there. As a first step toward proceeding, FAS hopes to begin construction imminently on a large underground parking structure, rationalizing the existing unattractive surface parking lots and providing the base for the new science buildings.
* Reaching skyward. Not every new building will be low rise or subterranean. Where appropriate, dense use of a site is propelling Harvard upward. The best examples are the Medical School's 430,000-square-foot research building in the Longwood Area, the most expensive single capital project now underway around campus, and the 15-story graduate-student housing tower rising at Western Avenue and Soldiers Field Road in Allston, on a former parking lot at a corner of the Business School campus (see "Steel and Skin"). Here, the operative idiom is the high-rise crane, the ironworker, and the steel I-beam, not the more subtle crafts of the meticulous 1990s restorations. Given the desperate pressure on graduate students, especially, in the Boston-Cambridge housing market, more such residential projects, wherever they can be sited, in diverse forms, will be brought on stream as soon as possible in this decade.
So much for the known plans. Others are in the works in virtually every school, some dependent on the Allston planning process, but many not. The Kennedy School of Government has spilled over into rented facilities, and looked hard at putting a new building in its courtyard, and the Graduate School of Education has burst its seams, too. There, the decision on Allston, especially if it emphasizes a new campus for professional education, may be determinative. The Law School, gearing up for a capital campaign, will certainly have to shape its ambitions to Allston planning, but will want to proceed to accommodate smaller classes and an enlarged faculty in situ. The Business School is gearing up a campaign, too. Clearly, a new Harvard is taking shape.
