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September-October 2007
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Born suggests that what was at stake was more than just building heights, or even the symbolic David-and-Goliath drama of the neighbors versus the University, but also two opposing ideas of what constitutes the public good. “When I became a city councilor, there was controversy about a supermarket chain wanting to build along the river. I thought the idea was appalling, but you couldn’t argue for the beauty of the river without sounding elitist. The Riverside group saw this supermarket as food for poor people. So for them, defeating a museum and getting some units of affordable housing is a victory of their definition of civic good.” In the opinion of Pebble Gifford, a longtime Cambridge activist, “Those people don’t care about Renzo Piano, they don’t give a damn who designs a museum down there. It’s not about architectural taste. It’s about ‘You already destroyed half our neighborhood, and now you want to destroy the other half?’” For his part, Northeastern’s George Thrush—himself a Cambridge resident—points out that Harvard’s neighbors often fail to acknowledge the benefits of living near a large and thriving university: “Never have people whose property values have risen so much complained so loudly.” Though the riverside museum was lost, the University managed to hold onto the architect. Piano was retained to renovate and expand the Fogg, a project whose construction will not begin until at least a year from now. The Piano museum is just one recent example of a Harvard project running into opposition from a neighborhood suspicious of institutional expansion. Because the University is in the middle of the city, its boundaries are blurry. Outrage arises when Harvard earmarks for construction a site it owns but has not hitherto developed. Plans to fill in open space—such as the lawn behind the GSD, initially proposed as a site for the Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS), or the empty skyscape filled by One Western Avenue—or to displace local businesses evoke visceral resentments having to do with psychological, rather than actual, property ownership: a sense that something that “belonged” to the neighborhood suddenly belongs to Harvard. The CGIS project, designed by Henry Cobb, former chair of the GSD’s department of architecture, went through several years of sometimes contentious public process—unquestionably adding to the ultimate cost of the project and the time it took Harvard to complete it. One attendee at an early meeting remembers that Harvard tried to justify the building’s initial siting by saying the campus had nowhere else to grow—“Which was the worst thing to say. The reaction was, ‘Don’t make your institutional problems into our neighborhood crisis.’” The project was finally completed in 2006—on a different site, with its program split between two buildings (it was originally conceived as a single structure) on opposite sides of a busy street, and without the underground tunnel that Cobb and Harvard wanted to connect the buildings. Yet the University’s senior director of community relations, Mary Power, points to many successful aspects of the CGIS process. “The dialogue produced many changes that were acceptable to the University and responsive to the community,” she says. Harvard preserved the green space behind the GSD; planted 200 trees; decreased proposed building heights; and moved old wood-frame houses to the edge of the site, where they were renovated as University office space—a practice which Harvard frequently employs, both as a way to rescue old structures and to mediate between the scale of residential and University buildings. Power also cites two current projects where the public process has been going smoothly: the northwest corner of the law school, now in site preparation; and a group of new science labs bordered by Oxford and Hammond Streets, currently under construction. The latter project includes a building by Rafael Moneo, whose work, like that of Piano and Hans Hollein, other architects admire hugely. “The strategy we’ve found successful in working with the neighbors is a culture of collaboration with a focus on mutual benefits,” Power says. “And we try to begin the dialogue early.”
 The politics of urban context: Who gets to judge whether a building fits in?Nobody, in the recorded history of the doomed Piano art museum, ever said, “I hate the building.” The aesthetic issue hardly came up: the battle was over siting and Harvard’s perceived encroachment into the neighborhood. In contrast, the controversy around Hans Hollein’s design for 90 Mount Auburn Street was, right from the beginning, a fight over aesthetics. The design was presented: some people loved it, some people hated it, and the question became not “Who’s right?” but “Who has the power to prevail?” The story began in 1999, when Harvard Planning and Real Estate announced it was going to tear down a couple of old buildings on Mount Auburn Street between J. Press and the Fox Club. The retail tenants—the Harvard Provision Co., Skewers restaurant, and University Typewriter—left cordially, but they were the kind of quirky small retailers whose passing dismays Cambridge residents (and Harvard alumni) who’ve lamented the gradual loss of the “old” Harvard Square to glossy chain stores and banks. 
Photograph by Jim Harrison After years of wrangling, the Center for Government and International Studies on Cambridge Street, which began as one structure, split into two and changed its site. Because one of the buildings on the site, an undistinguished clapboard triple-decker, dated from 1895, the University could not demolish it without permission from the Cambridge Historical Commission. Furthermore, the site was within a conservation district, so any new design would have to navigate a narrow Scylla-and-Charybdis set of requirements encouraging “creative modern architecture” that must also “complement and contribute to its immediate neighbors and the character of the District.” Harvard hired Austrian architect Hans Hollein to design an office building for the University libraries. Nazneen Cooper, assistant dean for campus design and planning for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, was involved with architect selection. “The University wanted something visionary,” she says. “This was a building with no pressing criteria. The scope was small and the risk was small, so we thought, ‘Great! Let’s get someone we otherwise wouldn’t get.’” Other architects considered were Rafael Viñoly, designer of the sleekly aggressive new Boston convention center; and Toyo Ito, whose work Cooper describes as “avant-garde, ephemeral, extremely beautiful. They just eat him up in California.” In some ways, she feels, “Hans Hollein was the most conservative of the three.” 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | continued >  
 
 
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