Masterpieces or Misfits

As a new wave of Harvard architecture nears completion, area critics and scholars are pondering whether the buildings comprising the new skyline are...

As three new buildings along the eastern edge of campus near completion, local architects and critics are busy debating the merits of the latest additions to the Harvard skyline.

There is no doubt that the Inn at Harvard in Quincy Square, the DeWolfe St. housing complex and Werner Otto Hall, the annex to the Fogg Art Museum--all of which are expected to be ready for use by the fall--will make a strong architectural impact on campus. But rather than exploring radical new territory, many critics say, the projects for the most part represent an affirmation of Harvard's traditional architectural style.

Whatever their opinions about the new construction, critics agree that the University has at least been paying proper attention to the projects. They point to the fact that Harvard has been working on them for several years with some of the Northeast's premier architectural firms.

The Inn was designed by Graham Gund Associates, a well-known Boston firm. Goody Clancy and Associates Inc.--which has designed other Harvard projects in the past, such as the Center for European Studies and the Law School's Austin Hall--planned the DeWolfe St. project. Werner Otto Hall is the product of the award-winning New York firm Gwathmey Siegel and Associates, which designed the recent addition to the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan.

"It's very clear that there's surge in the level of ambition and seriousness of intention that there didn't use to be" at Harvard, says Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New York Times.

A New Landmark

The most visible of the new buildings is the Inn, which is situated at Mass. Ave. and Harvard St., the former site of a Gulf gas station.

Rick Bechtel, the supervising architect for the project, says the Inn "will be seen as a real landmark for that end of Harvard Square." The Inn will be administered by Doubletree Hotels and may in the future be converted into an academic office building.

The design for the Inn includes red brick, pitch grooves and dormer windows and is sized "to respond to the character of a transitional building between the residential and commercial areas" of Harvard Square, Bechtel says.

The use of red brick and surface details such as window trim and balconies is designed to make the Inn blend into the surrounding traditional buildings, Bechtel says. "It is intended to relate to the existing houses along Mass. Ave. as well as the river," he says.

However, Bechtel adds, "people will know it's a new building. We've abstracted some of the details that you'd find in a Harvard building."

But critics of the Inn say that it may fit in too well.

"As a facade it relates to the river houses," says R. Philip Downs, an architect in Brighton and an outspoken member of Cambridge Citizens for Liveable Neighborhoods. "But it's a quadrangle facade ... with no quad."

"It's a neo-Georgian ripoff," he adds.

The Inn's relationship to the street is a concern of John Pitkin of the Central Cambridge Neighborhood Association, who calls the Inn "an inward-looking building rather than an outward-looking building."

"We'd like to see [the architects] treat it as a public space," Pitkin says of the building.

Too Traditional?

Like the Inn, the DeWolfe St. project is designed to fit in with its neighboring river houses. The building, which faces Quincy House, is similar to the river houses in scale and in surface details such as the red brick and white window frames, says John Clancy, the project's architect.

Clancy says that he wanted the building to have as much variety as possible in order to achieve a "residential feel." He says that has been accomplished through the use of dormer windows on the roof and bay windows on the face of the building.

The building's traditional design has met with both praise and criticism from those who have followed the plans.

"To me, it feels like a condominium project rather than a student dorm," says Lecturer in Architecture Jeremiah Eck, who is also a practicing architect in Boston.

Eck calls the DeWolfe design an example of "dry traditionalism. This one doesn't make enough of a reference to the contemporary edge that you would expect in the 1990s."

But Didier O. Thomas, the University's associate director for project planning, says the building could not have made a strong architectural statement.

"I think having a traditional design, where the scale was more residential, was the thing to do," Thomas says. "The neighborhood is pretty chaotic architecturally, and we wanted to create a kind of background piece."

Eck disagrees. "You have a context and either you're working with the context or not," he says. "It's pretty hard to be a background piece in that position."

Hugh A. Russell '64, an architect who sits on the Cambridge Planning Board, says that DeWolfe will have a positive impact on the street's architectural character because it will attract attention away from a neighboring eyesore.

"I always felt that Quincy House, where I lived for three years, was ugly," Russell says, adding that DeWolfe should make the scene better from a pedestrian point of view."

Too Contemporary?

The most ambitious, and least traditional, of the three buildings is Werner Otto Hall, which will be the new home of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. For this building, fitting in with the surroundings has been especially important because it faces the untraditional Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, the only North American building designed by the famous Swiss architect LeCorbusier.

Sekler calls the project "a very, very difficult job for the architect because of the Carpenter Center, which is of great historic importance. To have to put something near that is a great challenge for the architect."

The building features an open courtyard and "a three-story element which is set back from the street and turns to address the Carpenter Center," according to a statement by the architects. It also completes LeCorbusier's site circulation plan, a ramp which begins on Quincy St., continues through the Carpenter Center, and which will extend into the new Werner Otto Hall courtyard and down to Prescott St. by means of an exterior stair.

Marjorie Cohn, acting director of the adjoining Fogg Art Museum, says that while Werner Otto Hall, whose surface is made of limestone and metal panels, has a distinct character from the neighboring Fogg Museum and Carpenter Center, its presence is not too strong.

"We're happy that it is not really an assertive personality," Cohn says. "The Carpenter Center is so dominating it couldn't stand having something too assertive on that site."

Eck, on the other hand, believes that Werner Otto Hall goes too far in distancing itself from its neighboring buildings, something which he terms "a serious problem on this end of Harvard's campus."

"It is clearly a very well-crafted building," Eck says, "but the context is almost totally disregarded."

Taken together, most of the critics say, the three new buildings do not seem to represent a unified movement in Harvard architecture.

"What's interesting to me is that they're all three being built at the same time, three different interpretations of traditionalism," Eck says. "Maybe it represents the decentralization of the University."

One architectural historian, however, complains of what he sees as a common theme in Harvard's recent projects.

"They just seem to me to rely too much on Harvard Square architectural formulas," says Boston architect David P. Handlin '65, saying that most of the buildings sport brick facades with stone details.

"This kind of heavy-handed historicism, usually done without much knowledge of history, seems pretty ill-considered," Handlin says. "Some of the idealism that motivated the buildings back in the '50s and '60s starts to look attractive."

"I'm not for just fossilizing the city at a given point in time," Handlin continues. "Although we have an obligation to the past and what Cambridge was, we have an obligation to the future in that the physical plant of the University has got to respond to the needs of the educational program."