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September-October 2007
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 For the Mount Auburn Street site, Hollein designed a five-story building whose façade was a sloping, undulating metal mesh screen overhanging recessed ground-floor shop fronts. He presented his design at a hearing before the historical commission in April 2001. Lee Cott, whose firm Bruner/Cott was affiliated with Hollein on the project, remembers the evening as “awful.” Cooper calls it “embarrassing.” The commissioners grilled Hollein on basic issues of aesthetics and functionality. Why did the building curve? What was the “goal or intent” of the sloping façade? Had he thought about the snow that would collect in the screen? Did he understand what Cambridge winters were like? Hollein, visibly tired and jet-lagged, replied that he had considered all these issues, that he’d made many models and used his judgment in the design process, that he had designed buildings in the mountains of Europe where there was far more snow. When the meeting was opened to public comment, a Cambridge resident stood up and gave a lengthy lecture and slideshow about contextual architecture. “Hans Hollein is one of the world’s leading experts on contextual architecture,” Cooper says. “He doesn’t need someone to explain to him what ‘contextual’ means.” In a memo to the commissioners several days earlier, the commission’s executive director, Charles Sullivan, had called the building “inappropriately scaled” and “incongruous because of its aggressive indifference to its surroundings.” At the hearing, after a brief discussion, the commission voted 7-0 to reject Hollein’s design because it did not “complement and contribute to” its urban context in Harvard Square. Contextual architecture, like beauty, can be subjective and difficult to define. At its simplest, it has to do with a response to the size, scale, and style of the surrounding environment. But as Cooper points out, that doesn’t mean just replicating what’s already there. “Is context in Harvard Square a big parking garage which has no architectural merit but is red brick? Is that context?” Sometimes, she says, an architect’s response to context might be “juxtaposition. Look at Norman Foster’s Carré d’Art in Nîîmes—he’s saying, I respect the beauty of this very old architecture, so I’m going to respond to it by opposing it.” There is also the question of a building’s symbolic and visual importance within the larger urban scene. Kathy Born says, “In a place like Harvard Square, you need buildings that fit in, but you also need punctuation. Some of Harvard’s greatest buildings are the oddballs: Memorial Hall, the Lampoon.” How does one decide whether a certain site needs an attention-getting “object” building, or a well-mannered backdrop? Some architects, for instance, believe Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center would have worked better as a stand-alone building on a more prominent site (“Observatory Hill,” suggests one), while others feel that the building’s excitement and energy come from the way it’s jammed in between the serene red-brick Fogg and the Faculty Club. Ultimately, arguments about context boil down to taste. For everyone who says, “Yes, it’s contextual,” there’s someone else who says, “No, it isn’t.” In the case of the Hollein building, the power to decide rested solely in the hands of the Cambridge Historical Commission, which originated in 1963 partly in response to Harvard’s modern building projects (notably the Holyoke Center, whose “harsh exterior contrasted sharply with the comfortable brick vernacular of Harvard Square,” according to the commission’s website). Again, a public regulatory process trumped Harvard’s ability to build on its own land—and again, the public process had grown up partly in reaction to what and how Harvard built in the 1960s, the University’s single most explosive period of growth. Among architects, no one is waxing nostalgic over the good old days of arrogant, autocratic development. But they do worry about the impact all this public process has on the quality of architecture. Says one designer: “There’s now so much community review that it’s hard to build a building that hasn’t been pushed and massaged and changed.” So how good was the Hollein building? Nazneen Cooper found it “unusual and poetic.” Lee Cott, who calls the University’s choice of Hollein “a wonderful event,” believes the design was killed too early. “It was only a schematic design. It would have changed and gotten better if the process had been allowed to continue.” Before the commission met, critic Robert Campbell had written that the design seemed to “thrust and preen,” but also hoped it would be allowed to evolve in a way that was “feisty and inventive.” A year after the historical commission rejected Hollein’s approach, they unanimously voted to approve a design for the same site by Andrea Leers of Leers Weinzapfel Associates. In some ways, the Leers building, completed in 2006, echoes Ben Thompson’s classic 1970 Design Research building on Brattle Street, which now houses several retail stores. It is elegant and austere: a carefully detailed modern glass box. No one could fault it aesthetically. Some people might feel a pang for the funky old buildings and stores it replaced, although the ground floor provides a home for another independent retailer forced from the other side of the Square by a steep rent increase a year or two earlier: the Globe Travel Bookstore. Among architects, admiration for the Leers Weinzapfel building is widespread but muted; and the mutedness seems to come from a wistful sense of what might have been. What they miss is not so much the Hollein building but the symbolism of it, the fact that it would have been a bold, provocative piece of art. As Cott says, “It could have been the beginning of a new kind of architecture in Harvard Square.”
 The politics of branding: Who gets to define a “Harvard building”?Mention the Spangler Center to an architect familiar with Harvard, and two subjects will come up: the building, and the speech. The Spangler, a student center at Harvard Business School (HBS), was designed by Robert A.M. Stern. Currently dean of the Yale School of Architecture, Stern was a leading architect of the Shingle-Style Revival of the 1980s and is a respected architectural historian as well as a versatile designer whose work also includes modern buildings. 
Photograph by Jim Harrison The Business School’s neo-Georgian Spangler Center looks like a very nice country club—which can be read as either praise or indictment. Spangler Center is a neo-Georgian red-brick building with white trim. Located on one of HBS’s great lawns, rather than in a residential neighborhood, it was built without a lot of conflict, opposition, or drama. It looks like a very nice country club—which to some people might sound like praise and to others an indictment. But to Stern—and many would agree with him—the building is unmistakably Harvard. In his speech at the Spangler’s dedication in January 2001, Stern argued that a university needs to have its own brand, just as a corporation or product does; and that in an era when competition for students and resources is fierce, Harvard’s venerable red-brick-Georgian look is an important marketing asset which the University ought to be perpetuating. In other words, the brand already exists and it ain’t broke, so don’t try to fix it. (Interestingly, Stern’s speech fudged the issue of whether he was advocating for the future of brick neo-Georgian branding at Harvard as a whole, or just at the business school. Stern is currently working on the new building at the northwest corner of the Law School—a modern Beaux-Arts-influenced design whose façade calls for pale limestone.) Former Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers feels that, “With the exception of the business school, Harvard architecture has tended very much towards eclecticism, with many different styles juxtaposed in close proximity. Reasonable people differ, but I think Harvard has in general erred more on the side of variety than on the side of coherence in its architectural choices.” The reason the branding question is so important right now is, of course, Allston. The University’s plan to build an enormous new campus on the other side of the river has everyone wondering what it’s going to look like. As Lee Cott says, “Allston is the Harvard of the future.” University insiders acknowledge that Harvard first turned its sights on Allston in response to the increasing difficulty of getting things built in Cambridge. The grass looked greener over there (but as has been reported in this magazine, the process has already hit a Cambridge-like snag, as neighbors objected to plans for a new art museum because they disliked its height and size and had not yet reviewed an overall master plan; see “Off the Fast Track,” May-June, page 64). The scale of the Allston campus—more than 200 acres, and up to 10 million square feet of construction—ensures it will provoke the same political questions that have dogged Harvard in Cambridge: the politics of site, the politics of urban context, and the politics of branding and style. In addition to the many voices within the University, there will be neighbors, civic groups, and city agencies, all of whom will use available planning and zoning tools as leverage to achieve their own ends. As Kathy Born points out, “Harvard is up against pressures an ordinary developer doesn’t face. First, it’s here to stay. Every project is one of a series, and the repercussions from any given project last a long time. Second, there’s a perception that it’s a wealthy liberal institution and everything it does should benefit the public good. And third, pretty much everyone in the Boston area has a connection with Harvard. They went there, or didn’t get in, or worked there, or know someone who was fired. It’s personal. There’s no one who doesn’t have an attitude about Harvard.” George Thrush acknowledges the importance of public input and says that understanding how to navigate it is key to the success of both an architect and a university. “Architects need to treat the public process with as much attention as they treat the composition of a façade.” Tim Love is an architect who teaches at Northeastern and has done work for Harvard; he also worked as a designer for Machado and Silvetti on the Boston Public Library’s new Allston branch, sited on land provided by Harvard—a building that is praised as often as the firm’s One Western Avenue graduate-housing project is reviled. “The best architects know how to listen, and how to synthesize,” he says. “They hear different things from different stakeholders, and then come up with a design that gets it all in. The key is to do it democratically without moving a Ouija board around the community. Nor do you want to fall in love with a design concept and then have to defend it. It’s more like surfing—you watch carefully and wait, and then pick the right wave and ride it in.” But the Allston campus also, inescapably, raises questions of architectural style, taste, and beauty. As Robert Stern says, many university campuses have a brand: think of Yale’s Oxford-inspired Gothicism, or Stanford’s Californian Mission-inspired sandstone, or the lean steel I-beams and glass of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Illinois Institute of Technology. Should there be a Harvard brand in Allston? If so, what should it be? And what should be the interplay between the background buildings of the new campus (branded, or not) and its signature monuments? “The Allston site isn’t hemmed in by tradition,” Cott says. “It’s not historic. What Harvard has to do is build responsibly and wonderfully.” Cott, whose firm’s work includes the critically and popularly praised Mass MoCA, a contemporary art museum housed in the shells of a cluster of old mill buildings in North Adams, Massachusetts, dislikes the idea of a neo-Georgian—or indeed, neo-anything—campus in Allston. “We’ve got to get past thinking of architecture in terms of style. We don’t think of cars as modern or not—they are modern, they’re of this time. Once I said to a client who wanted a Colonial design, ‘I’ll make a deal with you. If you’re wearing leather underwear, I’ll design you a more traditional-looking building. But if your underwear is made of some modern material, then I’d like to ask you to keep an open mind about the design.’” Tim Love, like Stern, acknowledges the use of architectural branding as a corporate marketing tool, citing Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1937 Johnson Wax building in Racine, Wisconsin, and Eero Saarinen’s New York TWA terminal: “Those buildings really said something about the patron. They were brand-specific.” But Love thinks that the recent trend of universities hiring superstar architects is a different, and troubling, kind of branding. “Instead of the architect getting deep inside the culture of a university and customizing the expression of the building, as Saarinen might have done, the new model is more prêt-à-porter. By selecting architects with pre-established and media-validated styles, universities are perpetuating the architect’s own brand at the expense of the cultural insights and unique solutions that might be gained in a more open-ended and innovative design process.” Though Love agrees with Stern that branding is important, he thinks that neo-Georgian is a “cowardly” way to go about it. Like Cott, he feels that “buildings should look like what they are. The exteriors should give cues about what goes on inside.” In a sense, this is the old form-versus-function debate. Many architects would argue that aesthetic style—whether the approach is familiar and traditionalist, or spectacularly innovative, à la Frank Gehry—should not drive design. “Gehry does it responsibly, but when it’s handled irresponsibly, as it so often is, that kind of pure formalism goes too far and becomes meaningless,” says Hubert Murray, president of the Boston Society of Architects. “It’s spiritually empty, divorced from anything human. It has no connection with people and how they feel and live.” But it would be disingenuous to imply that function alone can design a good building. Says George Thrush: “People think modern buildings are transparent and honest about their functions. Wrong. All buildings lie. The question is, how beautiful is the lie?” Harvard’s choice of Behnisch Architects of Stuttgart to design the first Allston buildings, a science complex, signals that whatever the overall look of the new campus, sustainability will be a priority. The Behnisch firm is renowned for expertise in “green” design. Their Genzyme corporate headquarters building, near the MIT campus, is a shimmering modern interplay of reflective surfaces and energy-efficient technology. Great design at Harvard in the twenty-first century may result from a sensitive balancing of public process, the University’s needs, and an architect’s aesthetic vision. Inevitably some buildings will be dumbed down on their way to being built, and others will be killed outright. And still others will get built and be controversial. As Lawrence Summers observes, “It takes at least a decade before a building can be fully evaluated.” Yet at the same time, he says, “The buildings that the University erects are its longest-lived investments. Nothing is more important than getting architectural choices right.” Nazneen Cooper speaks of the idea of architecture as legacy. “We create a campus. It tells a story. Edmund Burke says that buildings aren’t just buildings—they are memories. One root of the word ‘architecture’ is ‘tectonic.’ It’s the making of an artifact: something that can tell us about cultures, civilizations, and time. The question is always: What do we want to leave behind?” Joan Wickersham’s column “The Lurker” is a regular feature in ArchitectureBoston magazine. Her memoir, The Suicide Index, will be published by Harcourt next year.  
 
 
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