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September-October 2007
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 In fact, the University has tried. During the past decade Harvard has given commissions to a couple of architects who are not just well-regarded but generally revered: Renzo Piano and Hans Hollein, both of whom have won the Pritzker Prize. Piano, best known for his museum work—the Pompidou Center in Paris, designed with Richard Rogers; the Menil Collection in Houston; and the recent addition to New York’s Morgan Library—was hired in 1999 to design a new museum for Harvard’s modern art collection. And Hollein, whose buildings in his native Vienna are described by design critics as masterpieces of urban contextual architecture (the adjective “jewel-like” comes up repeatedly) was asked to design a small building for the Harvard libraries. Ultimately, neither design was built. Meanwhile other buildings, including Robert A.M. Stern’s neo-Georgian Spangler Center for the Business School, have enjoyed smoother processes—though that building has also engendered debate about architectural taste. As George Thrush, head of the architecture program at Northeastern, says, “There are many problems a university can run into when it comes to getting things built—and Harvard usually runs into all of them.” No matter whom you talk to—architects, people within the University, Cambridge residents—three things are clear. First, there are a lot of fights about Harvard architecture. Second, many of them aren’t really about architecture at all. And third, they are won not by the group that makes the most persuasive argument, but by the group that has the most leverage in the particular situation.
The politics of site: Who gets to say what Harvard does with its land? The defeat of the Renzo Piano art museum on the Charles River began 40 years before the museum itself was even conceived. The parcel of land on which Harvard proposed to build the museum was adjacent to Peabody Terrace, the complex of low- and high-rise buildings constructed in the 1960s to house graduate students and their families. Designed by then GSD dean Josep Lluis Sert, Peabody Terrace has always been admired by architects (Leland Cott, an architect and a professor at the GSD, calls it “one of the world’s canonical housing projects”), but is generally disliked by those outside the profession, who find it cold and oversized. The neighbors hated it. The Riverside neighborhood was (and still is) a patchwork of small streets and modest clapboard houses. Peabody Terrace’s three 22-story towers cast a long shadow, both literally and figuratively. For years, front-yard fences in Riverside displayed, alongside the climbing roses, signs deploring Harvard expansion. Riverside activist Saundra Graham (who went on to become a Massachusetts state representative) famously disrupted Harvard’s 1970 Commencement with a protest against further development. In 1999, James Cuno, then director of Harvard’s art museums, announced plans to develop a piece of land next to Peabody Terrace that was owned by Harvard and occupied for years by a popular nursery business. Renzo Piano would design two new museums: one to house contemporary art, and the other for ancient, Islamic, and Asian art. Piano’s design concept called for two-story wooden buildings virtually hidden by a screen of trees. Boston Globe art critic Christine Temin wrote that when Piano showed her his plans, her response was, “So where is it?” (See “Down by the Riverside: A Progress Report,” May-June 2001, page 72, for images that the magazine has not been given permission to reproduce here.) The balance of the site would be used for University housing. Observers called Piano’s design “bucolic” and “tactful”—but Riverside neighbors, still angry about Peabody Terrace, petitioned the Cambridge City Council to stop the project. “Neighborhoods have enduring cultures,” says Kathleen Leahy Born, an architect who was a member of the council at the time. She remembers seeing pen-and-ink sketches of the Piano project. “You couldn’t tell much about it, but it was low. I thought it would have been a nice and very fitting use of the land along the river.” The neighbors were concerned about traffic, and proposed that the University scrap the museum and use the site for a public park. That proposal recalled what had happened 25 years earlier when a citizens’ group foiled plans to build the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum at the edge of Harvard Square. The I.M. Pei-designed project was eventually sited at the University of Massachusetts, Boston campus in Dorchester, and a park was built on the Harvard Square site instead, along with the Kennedy School of Government. 
Photograph by Jim Harrison On the cover: Harvard’s high-rise housing project at One Western Avenue The neighbors’ opposition to Piano’s museum also reflected their antipathy toward the new Harvard building that was going up directly across the river in Allston—a building Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell ’58, M.Arch. ’67, described by coining the term “hate-object.” One Western Avenue (at left), a 15-story graduate-student residence designed by GSD faculty members Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti, was intended as a gateway for the University’s new Allston campus. Boston mayor Thomas Menino publicly criticized the architects’ proposal, and the building’s tower was shortened and re-oriented as a result. And when the building finally opened in 2003, Campbell commented, “In 30 years of writing about architecture, I’ve never heard so many expressions of outrage over a new building.” Cambridge responded to the Riverside neighbors by imposing an 18-month development moratorium on Harvard’s proposed museum site. As Born explains, “A moratorium isn’t the same as a simple delay. It’s enacted with the understanding that the time will be used for a planning process.” Eventually, a compromise was announced. Harvard decided not to build a museum, and new zoning was put in place that would allow housing between three and six stories tall on the site. As a concession to the neighborhood, Harvard agreed to build approximately 40 units of affordable community housing nearby, and to donate $50,000 to neighborhood groups. 
Photograph by Jim Harrison The towering Peabody Terrace housing complex, built in the 1960s, rises behind older housing of a far smaller scale. The neighbors had done what they’d been powerless to achieve 40 years before with Peabody Terrace: they had stopped Harvard from building what Harvard wanted to build. (There are rumors that some within Harvard had wanted all along to use the proposed museum site for University housing. It’s possible that external pressure from the neighbors accomplished what internal politicking could not.) “Exhilarating,” one Riverside activist told the Globe in 2003, after the compromise was announced. But had the neighborhood really benefited? Instead of a two-story museum in a park-like setting, they ended up with taller student dorms and a small public park adjacent to heavily traveled Memorial Drive. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | continued >  
 
 
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