Construction:

A FRIEND of mine in Adams House told me about a recurring dream she has. The House seems to become the last refuge of a disaster wrecked earth. It quickly fills up with refugees from distant places--like Dunster House. Cots appear in the dining room, strange faces lean against the walls in the underground tunnels. The pick of Widener's collection is transported to the House, and quickly overflows the House library, forming stacks in the entryways. She attributes the dream to exam period, but I'll bet that plenty of Harvard administrators have lately ben having the same fantasy, only on a larger scale.

The Class of '77 will walk into a Harvard which is experiencing the worst growing pains it has had for quite a while--pains which are the symptoms of long standing problems in the Harvard community. And for the first time since 1949, when Lamont Library was completed, the headache and stomach upset of construction will be felt in Harvard Yard.

The two major construction projects underway now in the Yard are probably the last buildings that will be built there for some time. They represent the most concentrated modernization effort the Yard has seen since the early 1930s, when both Wigglesworth Hall and Memorial Church were under construction.

In the North Yard, Hunt Hall, long an architectural curiosity, and recently the home of the Vis Stud Department and the Graduate School of Design, has been demolished to make way for Canaday Hall, a new freshman dorm. At the other end of the Yard, bulldozers and dynamite are digging a 40-foot trench that will become, hopefully by the spring of 1975, the Pusey Library, an addition to Widener.

Construction has been started this summer in order to minimize the disruption in the Yard during the fall term. Library construction began on June 18, the day following Commencement. The most annoying aspect of the Pusey work will be blasting to remove rock from the bottom layers of the excavation. Blasting will begin in August, and should be finished by late September, around registration time, Bob Burbank, project supervisor for Buildings and Grounds, predicted.

Noise from the two sites will jackhammer at the ears of Yard residents for some time. The structural frame of the dorm will be going up during the Fall, and will hopefully be completed by the first frost, so that inside work can be done during the winter. Canaday will be ready for occupancy in the Fall of 1974 of all goes well, but he Pusey site will be an obstacle to anyone walking through the Yard until April 1975.

The new library, designed by Cambridge architects Hugh Stubbins and Associates, was designed to have minimum architectural impact on the Yard. It is in the open field which had served as passageway between the Widener-Memorial Church quadrangle and the Union, and will appear to terrestials as a nine-foot high plateau, its roof covered by grass, shrubs, and a walkway.

A grassy surrounding mound will block it from view, and underground passages will link it with other parts of the library complex. The $8 million structure will have three levels, most of which will be underground. A small courtyard will break the plateau near one corner.

Pusey is part of an overall contingency plan for library expansion. It will house overflow from widener, Houghton and Lamont, the surrounding libraries. The University Archives, the map collection, and the theater collection will be among Pusey's two million volumes. Its first phase is scheduled top be in operation by Spring, 1975, but the size of the library can be doubled by the construction at some later date of phase two, which involves underground expansion.

IF SPACE is still needed for books, plans call for the demolition of 17 Quincy Street, the President's House, which is now used as office space for the Corporation, and the erection of an above-ground library on the site.

President Bok has said that this decision will not have to be made until 1975 or 1980, and the Administration is gambling that Pusey will solve all library problems. By 1980, Bok has said, "we hope that new technology in the area of minituarizing archives will have made further expansion of the library unnecessary."

Designers claim that the structure will look more foliated than the barren space that it replaces. Critics say that the compromise between unobtrusiveness and some degree of exposure to light and air for those who will use the library has resulted in a building which is neither inconspicuous nor aesthetically pleasing. In any case, the undergraduates who will carefully avoid the construction site will not be permitted inside once Pusey is finished. Everyone except graduate students, Faculty, and those who need to use special collections will be turned away from the library.

The Canaday Hall project was motivated by a different kind of overcrowding. In October 1971, President Bok announced a plan by which the University would move from a 4:1 ratio of men to women to a 2.5:1 ratio, substantially adding to Radcliffe enrollment while keeping Harvard class size fairly stable. Beginning with the Class of 1976, Radcliffe enrollment was to be increased from 315 a class, to about 450, and Harvard class size dropped from 1200 to about 1150. The Bok plan, in sum therefore, called for an increase of about 10 undergraduates a year. In fact, Harvard Admissions has been loath to trim a full 50 men from the Harvard class, and the entering class of 1977 will have 1175 men and 475 women, closely matching the 2.5:1 ratio.

Because the ratio improvement is being carried out through an increase in overall enrollment, the University was faced with an immediate need for housing. Harvard's response was to purchase the Hotel Continental, on Garden Street. Half of the hotel's space was renovated, and turned into an addition to the Radcliffe Houses in order to accommodate the initial increase of about 100 students. This year, the entire hotel will be used by undergraduates, in order to accommodate the second increase.

Plans were drawn up for new construction to accommodate further increases, and to house displaced undergraduates when the Continental is converted to graduate student housing for next year. Presidents Bok and Horner both fovored construction at the Radcliffe Quad. With the final decision on the merger of Radcliffe and Harvard coming close, it was felt that not enough attention and money was being devoted to the Radcliffe Houses. Construction was seen as a device to upgrade the Radcliffe Quadrangle, and partially offset the emphasis placed on Harvard by prior decisions about housing and classroom facilities.

ALSO INVOLVED was the issue of freshman housing. Harvard freshmen, except for the minority who are now assigned to Radcliffe Houses, live segregated from the other classes, in the Yard. Radcliffe, on the other hand, has always had four-class living arrangements. Housing construction at the Quad would commit a larger proportion of the freshmen class to the four-class arrangement, while construction in the Yard would further institutionalize the Harvard arrangement.

A design involving construction of "fill-in" units between the Radcliffe dorms ringing the Quad was unanimously approved by the South House Committee, and seemed likely to win approval over the Hunt Hall plan. However, short of capital funds, the University's decision in favor of the demolition of Hunt, was made by the man who put up the money--Ward M. Canaday '07, a Toledo, Ohio automobile magnate, who gave $3 million.

No sooner was the Hunt Hall plan announced by Bok on March 22 than new controversy erupted. The Faculty Council passed a confidential resolution in early May asking that Bok consider relocating, or substantially reducing, the size of the dorm. The Council said the new building would overcrowd the Yard, or look out of place. An ad hoc Save Hunt Hall committee, which claimed that Hunt was an architectural land-mark, collected 779 signatures on a petition asking that Hunt be saved from demolition.

Although no one argued that Hunt represented great architecture, and represented great architecture, and very few people knew where the building was before the controversy, Len Gittleman, lecturer on photography, called Hunt "the only building in Boston that represents the struggles of American architecture at the turn of the century," and the Society of Architectural Historians joined the fight to preserve the structure.

Hunt Hall was designed by architect Richard Hunt, who also designed the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It was completed in 1895 to house the Fogg Art Museum, which was since moved to a building on Quincy Street, across from the Yard.

The building was an instant failure. The Crimson said, "The lines of the building are hardly what the College had hoped for." Observers found the building "squatty," "awkward," or wished that it had more height and more windows. When Memorial Church was built just south of its site, Hunt became a hidden anomaly in the Yard, chopping at the tall white spire of the proud Church.

FACED WITH the need to put Canaday's $3 million somewhere, Bok cut down the size of the proposed dorm, winning approval for the project from the Faculty Council, and announced to the Save Hunt Hall lobby that the building would come down.

In spite of all the controversy involved with the dorm site, Canaday is only a temporary solution. By the time it is open for occupancy, the Continental will have been given over to graduate students, and in spite of the 200 students housed in Canaday, the University will have 100 extra bodies on its hands. And at this time, no one know where those bodies will be housed.

"A year from now, I wouldn't be surprised if we're putting people up on army cots in Memorial Hall," Burris Young, associate dean of Freshmen, said last month. Because the 2.5:1 decision was made without a thorough consideration of its effects on the University as a whole, Harvard's housing problems may continue for some time.

Construction is also going on outside the Yard. On May 10, ground was broken for the Tozzer Library, on Divinity Avenue north of the Yard. The new library will house 100,000 books on anthropology and ethnography. It will serve as an addition to the severely overcrowded Peabody Museum Library. The $1.6 million library is named after one of its donors, Alfred M. Tozzer '00, a Mayan scholar and former professor of Anthropology.

THE STICKIEST of Harvard's building projects is the Kennedy Library complex, to be built on a 12-acre site now occupied by subway yards across Boylston Street from Eliot House. The development is the work of the Kennedy Corporation, which is in charge of the Kennedy Library and a museum exhibiting Kennedy Administration memorabilia on the site, but the complex will also include the Kennedy School of Government and the Institute of Politics, both Harvard institutions. The subway yards will be vacated by the MBTA in May 1974, and the library is slated to be finished by May 1976.

The museum itself will be enclosed inside a seven-story glass pyramid. A crescent-shaped five story building will curve around three sides of the museum, housing the School of Government, the Institute, and over 12 million pages of documents from the kennedy Administration. Commonwealth Park, dedicated to the people of Massachusetts--who gave their land for the complex--will face the Charles River.

The $27 million project is now only half the size that was originally planned. "It was scaled down for dollar considerations and to better fit in with the design of Harvard Square," Stephen c. Smith, the president of the Kennedy Corporation, explained.

Architect I.M. Pei designed the complex to blend with the surrounding area. "Because this is a relatively large piece of land, we are able to maintain the size and bulk of the Harvard Houses," he said. The main building, at 55 feet, will equal Eliot and Kirkland Houses in height.

The White Kennedy first announced in 1961 that Kennedy would build his library in Cambridge, and in 1963 he chose a site near the Business School. In 1965, the City Council invited the library to build in Cambridge, and specifically mentioned the subway yard site. However, in spite of this and the prestige value of the library, as well as the construction jobs it is likely to provide, the complex has run into much opposition in the community.

The argument over the Kennedy Library site hinges on two issues: parking and related facilities construction on the site. The library is expected to attract at least one million tourists a year, and cause a six to seven per cent increase in traffic in the area. Community groups have called upon the Kennedy Corporation to provide hundreds of parking spaces to accommodate the crowds.

THE LIBRARY plans have touched off a wave of building in the Cambridge area. Kanavos Enterprises, a Cambridge development firm, has announced plans for a 315 room Holiday Inn across from the Harvard Square Post Office, to be finished by June 1974, and another local developer, Graham Gund, plans to build a 500 room hotel on a Memorial Drive site. Both developers have said that they expect most of their business to come from visitors to the library.

Some observers speculate that the number of tourists that the library will attract, coupled with rising land costs, will radically change the character of commercial life in the Square, replacing small shops and coffee houses with fast-food stores and tourist-related enterprises. Oliver Brooks, chairman of the Harvard Square Task Force, a group of local residents, said that local businessmen are uncertain about the effect the Library will have on business. "Some feel that it will increase business, while others think that the crowds, the pushing and the shoving may lower volume," Brooks explained.

Of the 12 acres on the Kennedy site, only three will be taxable. The rest of the site is Federal or University property. For this reason, the character of related facilities to be built on those three acres is crucial to Cambridge.

The Cambridge Planning and Development Department has stated, that the library project must "substantially augment the tax base and economic activity of Cambridge." Construction of tax exempt facilities "on the site, which is some of the potentially most valuable real estate in North America, is a luxury which Cambridge is hard pressed to afford," the Department continued.

The Planning Department is asking for a return of $750,000 to the City from the related facilities construction, but the nature of the facilities that will be built is still undetermined. The original Kennedy Corporation plans called for 120 condominium apartments to be built on the site, but his plan was abandoned for economic reasons.

Community groups who are negotiating with the Corporation over a master plan to tie in the library project with development in the Square area are pushing for a related facilities plan which includes apartments and stores. Although the community groups have reported some progress in the negotiations, no concrete agreement has emerged from the talks.

Opposition to the Library plans is centered in the neighborhood near the Square. Brooks said that he could not state "with assurance that the library is here to stay," but the jobs, and the economic boost that the project will provide have won it backers in area farther from the Square.

It is almost certain that the Kennedy Library development will become a permanent part of Harvard Square.

The experience of the Kennedy Library points up a theme which is common to large urban universities. Faced with the need to expand, pressed for space and responsible only to a constituency of academics, their plans jar the sensibilities of the community. Unable or unwilling to evaluate the effect of their actions on the surrounding area, they often act irresponsibly.

Bok's 2.5:1 plan, which panders to coeducation and expansion at the same time, was formulated to simultaneously appease students who wanted more women at Harvard, and alumni who would not accept a reduction in male enrollment. The decision has already sealed the doom of Hunt Hall, and each oversized class that it brings to Cambridge will act as a wedge to force Cambridge residents away from Harvard Square. As long as the priorities of prestige and academic whim guide Harvard's plans, the University will face tough decisions about where and how to build.

And unless Burris Young actually does put army cots in Memorial Hall, the process will begin again. There's 100 more in every class.