|
May-June 2008
|
< previous | 1 | 2 
Cranes dominate the future site of the Law School’s Northwest Corner Building. But what of the other northwest building? There, north of the law school’s Pound Hall, cranes dominate the landscape, placing massive load-bearing elements into position prior to construction above grade. Last year’s demolition of the Everett Street parking garage was accomplished with elegant precision. Jets of water had arced across the site, directed at the dust that would otherwise have choked the scene. From a huge, crawling machine emerged a boom tipped with an enormous metal pick. One couldn’t help but be reminded of a bad day at the dentist as it pecked discerningly at the dripping tangle of exposed rebar and concrete. Now the site is level and clear, the pain in the jaw has passed, and one may erect in the mind’s eye a building that will be as venerable as it is fresh from the day it opens. That is a specialty of the architect Robert A. M. Stern, who also designed the Business School’s Spangler Student Center. This one, at 250,000 square feet in size, will have classrooms as well as space for student activity and recreation, and a center for clinical legal programs, the fertile educational ground where theory and practice meet. 
Two views of the Kyu Sung Woo-designed graduate-student housing now rising on Memorial Drive.
Meanwhile, down by the Charles River, 300 units of new housing (with 500 beds), primarily for graduate students, are nearing completion. The largest of the many buildings that make up the project, clad in red brick and glass, was designed by Kyu Sung Woo Architects, and overlooks Memorial Drive and the river. Here again, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates are providing landscape design. An adjacent park, once leased to a garden center, came about as the result of negotiations with neighbors, who valued the open space at that location. Three smaller, wood-frame buildings were designed by Elkus/Manfredi Architects, LTD. They are also the designers of six wood-frame buildings on Grant Street, and one on Cowperthwaite, built to de-emphasize the scale of an adjacent brick-and-glass apartment house that went up on the site of a surface parking lot. Now the parking is underground. Increasingly there is nowhere left to go but down when building in Cambridge. 
Pre-work has begun for the science complex in Allston, where the Harvard Stem Cell Institute will eventually be housed. That is true of Allston, too, where a new science complex of four buildings is about to rise above an underground parking garage with perhaps 600 or more spaces. The building, designed by Behnisch Architects, and a million square feet in all, will be green—not in hue, but in terms of energy consumption and waste (see “An Allston Metamorphosis?” November-December 2006, page 66). Planners have considered all kinds of modern engineering to make it as energy efficent as possible: a black, solar chimney to suck warm air from the building on sunny days in summer, and an all-season geothermal heating and cooling system. 
A new wood-frame building on Cowperthwaite Street softens the profile of a six-story brick-and-glass apartment complex. Harvard engineers have found that the geology of the area is not so well understood as they once thought. On one site across the Charles, a geothermal well more than 600 feet deep, designed for fresh water, served up brine. Not a happy outcome from the standpoint of corrosion, but valuable information that Allston planners will no doubt put to use many times in the decades ahead as they build a new campus—perhaps 10 million square feet, and counting.  
 
 
|
