THE ARTS

(Jack Wilner '41, writer of the weekly column, The Arts, this week turns over his space to a guest columnist, Professor Kenneth J. Conant of the Department of Architecture.--Ed.)

Many visitors to Cambridge are not impressed by the Yard because it lacks the grandeur and monumental arrangement of newer collegiate groups, such as those at Columbia, Illinois, Duke, Virginia, and California (to mention only a few). On the other hand there is an unsuspected historical interest in our group, which shows, in one way or another, the vicissitudes of three centuries of building and several key systems of planning.

The college started out with quarters in ordinary houses, as explained by the tablets on the 1859 Gate and just inside the Porcellian Gate, and indicated by brick gammidae in the pavement south of Wadsworth House. Wadsworth House was built in the eighteenth century, but the presence of that old house is a reminiscence of the character of this part of Cambridge in its earliest days. The town stretched casually down the pleasant southerly slope toward the river, being divided into many individual plots. The primitive buildings have vanished, but the subdivision into numerous small plots, and the casual arrangement, still remain. President Lowell opposed the reconstruction of this area--he told me once that he preferred to have it survive as a series of "nooks" between the Yard and the river front.

When the Old College was built, on the site of Grays Hall, it was on the northern side of town, and it looked across a little "Yard" to the back of the old houses just as Grays does to the back of Wadsworth. The Old College of 1642 was itself much like an enlarged edition of a house, as the model in Hunt Hall shows.

The Yard system of arrangement was given up when the first Harvard Hall and its neighbors were built. The scheme called for a series of five of these areas, each intended to have buildings on the south, east, and north sides. This was an English collegiate scheme which is magnificently exemplified at Oxford and Cambridge, but it was never completed here.

With the construction of University Hall (1813) comes the next episode. In the earlier studies made by Bulfinch, University Hall looks like a state capitol, and it was to stand alone in the center of the Yard, which was to have a fringe of buildings along the street on all four sides. University was erected in less pretentious form, and the grandoise "fringe" scheme was forgotten when the old Gore Hall Library and the old Appleton Chapel were put on sites now covered (and more) by Widener and the Memorial Church. All these were set like buildings in a park, embowered in fine old trees.

Further changes came in the 1870's when President Eliot got under way. The construction of Thayer and Weld created a "mall" on the western side of University Hall. This mall idea had of course been used in Washington and at the University of Virginia, and another mall is now being made on the long axis between Gannett House and Mallinckrodt.

Thayer and Weld, by cutting off the mall, created a new "Yard" to the east of University Hall between the chapel and the library. Sever was built (1878-1880) to close this on the eastern side. Robinson and Emerson beyond its form an open-sided quadrangle on Quincy Street, which is of course the English scheme previously referred to. Then President Lowell, by building Lionel, Mower, Straus, Lehman, and the Wigglesworths, brought back the "fringe" system proposed in Bulfinch's day, so that now all of the various plan schemes are represented in the composite group on the college plot. This is less satisfactory than a big modern monumental layout perhaps--but it is more interesting