Cover Article
Bricks & Politics
What gets built at Harvard, what doesn't, and why
by Joan Wickersham
Every 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.
They 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 greatest appreciators of one another’s work—view the aesthetic quality of what’s being built around Boston.
Since 2000, juries have recognized buildings on the Wellesley campus twice, at Northeastern University twice, and at MIT once. The last time a Harvard building was chosen was in 1994: the Law School’s Hauser Hall, designed by Kallman McKinnell and Wood.
The aim here is not to compare institutions in a ferocious, competitive, why-hasn’t-America-won-more-gold-medals-in-these-Olympics sort of way, but rather to point out that, for much of the twentieth century, Harvard was perceived as a leader in modern architecture, so the absence of its newest buildings from the list of what architects consider “most beautiful” is surprising.
Photograph by Jim Harrison
This elegant and austere office building for the Harvard University Library rose at 90 Mount Auburn Street after the Cambridge Historical Commission rejected a design by Viennese architect Hans Hollein that would have been a bold, provocative piece of art that might have begun “a new kind of architecture in Harvard Square.”
Harvard’s modern architectural vision began when Walter Gropius was brought in to lead the architecture program at the Graduate School of Design (GSD) in 1937, and arguably reached its peak with the Carpenter Center, completed in 1963, the only building Le Corbusier ever designed in the United States. The campus also includes work by Alvar Aalto, Josep Lluis Sert, James Stirling, Robert Venturi, and Ben Thompson. Architects who studied or taught at the GSD—including I.M. Pei, Henry Cobb, Paul Rudolph, Philip Johnson, Hugh Stubbins, and Frank Gehry—have had an unparalleled impact on American architecture since World War II. Ada Louise Huxtable, the former architecture critic for the New York Times, wrote: “Harvard led an architectural revolution in the 1930s……that was virtually responsible in this country for the breakthrough for modern architecture” (see “The Forgotten Modernist,” page 58.)
So why isn’t Harvard still hiring amazing architects to design amazing buildings?
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