FAS Plans Humanities Arc

The reconstruction of Memorial Hall is only one part of the comprehensive $50 million plan to organize campus departmental buildings.

The Union will be transformed into a Humanities Center at the heart of a Humanities complex, bringing together the now diffuse offices of related departments including English, Folklore and Mythology, Literature, Comparative Literature and History and Literature.

The Humanities "arc" will stretch from Boylston Hall to the Sackler Museum. Construction on the new Humanities Center is expected to be completed by the fall of 1996.

Plans for a Social Sciences Complex are also underway, forming yet another "piece of the puzzle," according to Philip J. Parsons, director of planning and senior development officer in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).

Eventually the renovations and construction will encompass much of what Parsons calls the "FAS are," with the Science Center and Memorial Hall occupying the central, focal portion.

"Memorial Hall is central to our plans to create a more integrated and interdisciplinary campus," he says. "I think that it's indicative of progress that we're bringing the focal point of campus closer to science."

The Memorial Hall focus is underscored by the impending renovations of Alumni Hall, Sanders Theatre and the transept.

When Alumni Hall becomes the first-year dining area, it will return to its original function Until the 1920, the Gothic-revival hall housed students eating at Oxford-style traditional 12-seat tables.

"We are restoring the great hall to its original condition," says Parsons. "Students will dine amidst the golden wood and stained glass of the room, beneath the classical Ruskinidn hammerbean-trusses.

The 540-seat hall is expected to serve approximately 1,350 students during its busiest hours.

But Parsons says its "state-of-the-art food distribution setup and proximity to the Yard might necessitate an extension of dining accommodate additional students who eat there. Between 1,600 and 1,700 students could then take meals from a new cafeteria system being designed by Birchfield Foodsystem.

Sanders Theatre will have its stage extended, sound system updated and lighting and seating improved through the construction process. It will also be improved by the additions of dressing rooms, warco-up rooms and a green room.

The transept, which serves as the Sanders Theatre Jobby, will remain largely intact except for a few issued more quickly once a commit-improvements in lighting and the elimination of the wind tunnel effect which plagues the chamber.

Designed by William Ware, class of 1852 and Henry Van Brunt, class of 1854, in 1878 as a memorial to the Harvard men who died in the Civil War, the transept's tablet-covered walls and central stained glass window will not be altered.

The project's architects, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown of Philadelphia, have together completed more their 50 academic projects on 19 college campuses, including the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth and Princeton.

Venturi won the 1991 Pritzker Architecture Prize from the Hyuit Foundation, and is the author of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, considered a milestone in architectural theory.

In 1990 Scott Brown was the Noyes Visiting Critic at the Graduate School of Design.