Boylston Reconstruction to End Nov. 1

Complete interior reconstruction of Boylston Hall, including the addition of two new floors and a suspended mezzanine, will be finished by Nov. 1, the CRIMSON learned yesterday. James C. Deveney, assistant superintendent of Buildings and Grounds, said that despite delay caused by the steel strike, the November deadline will be met.

With nothing but its exterior shell unchanged, Boylston will be a unique synthesis of old and new at Harvard. The outside is in the style of 18th century architecture, the inside newer than Quincy House.

By "sandwiching in" two new floors and a mezzanine and utilizing waste space in the basement, the Architects Collaborative have in effect doubled the space in Boylston, Joseph Aspasquella, construction superintendent, explained.

The building used to house administrative offices for the modern and ancient language departments and a few classrooms. Now, with five classrooms, seven seminar rooms, an auditorium, and two audio-visual labs, it also provides 108 office rooms. The new offices will be used by the departments of ancient and modern languages, Classics, and History and Literature. The Romance and German departmental libraries will also be moved to Boylston.

To rebuild the interior entirely, construction workers had to replace all of the old wooden beams and window sashes with steel ones. Hoisting the 54-foot steel supports for the new floors through the windows without knocking down the building's shell made it "the toughest job I've ever come across," Aspasquella observed.

Treatment of the building's interior walls varies greatly on each floor. Some walls are covered with colored tile, others with brick or stucco design, still others with mahogany battened strips. Corridors on all but the first floor are bound by sheets of opaque glass. In every part of the building the designers attempted to achieve a sense of three dimensionality, Aspasquella noted.