The Other Case for Currier House

It is like the turning of the seasons, an indelible mark on the ebb and flow of Harvard life: some poor blocking group is quadded to Currier House, their burning effigy dissolving into destroyed hopes on the otherwise calm Charles. Their friends in Adams laugh at the fountain and the bland white walls, as they whisper thank yous to men like Roosevelt. The quadded kids fight back with one liners about the ten-man, about Heaven and Hell, making good points but missing the true beauty of the house: its design for inevitable community living, defining it as the most successful House-system residence of all.

Picture this—it’s game 6 of the Yankees-Red Sox series, and you wanted to watch it with a crazy group of kids who were brought together by a common love of excitement, of sport. If you live in Quincy, you don’t run down to the big lounge, as the rather sparsely populated picture on the front page of the Crimson a week or so ago clearly demonstrated. Maybe you run out to a bar, or your friend’s place at BC. You should have come to Currier.

The last four games of the series packed the GLM (Gilbert Lower Main) with a crowd fluctuating from thirty to an uncountable number of people. While it may be true that Currier has a high ratio of athletes, this is not the reason for the crowd—Currier House is designed to create areas of passage, locations of communication, and, as a result, community connection and increased house bonding. The GLM is in a location through which almost every resident passes on a daily basis. The dining hall is a necessary stop on the way home, unlike the satellite dining halls so common at the river Houses. Currier only has one commonly used entrance, and so the entryway itself becomes a uniting factor. Even the shuttle, the cause of so much woe for new Quadlings, provides a forum for day-to-day communication. The result is that Currier residents know each other very well. The existence of wide open spaces and large groups watching playoff baseball and political events on television not only brings the tutors and masters into the common rooms to cheer alongside us, which they do, but also brings shy residents into a forum without awkward silence.

As I drove with three Currier hallmates to New York City for Game 7 of the ALCS, I felt a pang of regret that I would not be watching the game with my fellow Currierites. My friends agreed—here we were, on the road to what would become the most epic sporting event of our lives, and there was something pulling us back, though of course we wanted to be at the game more than anything. We kept in telephone contact with the GLM the entire game, not only to share our joy, but also so that we could hear theirs.

Building a residential house is all about defining student space, about deciding how students should interact and then reinforcing that idea with real design principles. The same goes for academic buildings—Frank Gehry’s new building at MIT, designed with the idea of collaborative communication among quiet, shy professors in mind, has already created murmurs of increased productivity. The hallways and common spaces require day-to-day interaction by necessity. It is clear that the designers of Currier House had much the same idea in mind—students will interact over more than just dinner; students will experience the serendipitous, and productivity will increase.

The flow of people through common space aids more than just the Nielsen ratings of Fox. Currier residents passing through Main Street, as House Master Joe Badaracco calls the Lower Main, tend to share views, be they political, social, or otherwise. As work gets intense and the nights get late, people come out of their shells in the centralized areas, and some learn more in five minutes than they learned all week in class.

As the administration begins to design residences in Allston, I implore the Corporation to consider these ideals—create space to move through, and to stop in. Create space where students will be forced to rub elbows outside of their blocking groups, and where the resident masters, scholars, and tutors will be encouraged to make daily contact on a pedestrian level. This can be done so simply, and yet it is absent from much of campus, whether one is taking an elevator to their suite without passing through any usable space or winding up a rather exclusive staircase. College should not be intellectually comfortable—it should spark debate, confuse you, challenge you, and improve you. As such, residences, as Currier so successfully does, should, through their silent designs, encourage give-and-take, and a healthy fear of the Currier tree.

Jonathan C. Bardin ‘06-’07 is a Visual and Environmental Science concentrator in Currier House.