New CGIS Buildings Plagued By Minor Annoyances

Late yesterday afternoon fire alarm bells rang at 1737 Cambridge Street, forcing the last students still around before break to stream out of their classes in the Knafel Building of Harvard’s Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS) and mill about a fire truck while firefighters inspected the building.

The false alarm was the latest event in a series of minor frustrations that have dogged users of the CGIS buildings ever since they opened at the start of the semester. But despite months of mild annoyances including temperature complaints, some uncompleted facilities, and ongoing construction work, most students and faculty members seem resigned to the situation.

“I believe there have been some problems with the two buildings, but in my experience they have been relatively minor,” John H. Coatsworth, director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and an inhabitant of a second-floor office, said. “The most significant...problem I have observed is that some of the offices become too cold on cold days.”

John S. Haddock ’07, who has been going to the CGIS complex since September, said, “We definitely came into the semester having buildings that were unfinished ...and you kind of expect with having to do work that they will be finished.”

Douglas E. Lieb ’07, a member of a Social Studies tutorial that meets every week in CGIS, mentioned ongoing painting projects as an occasional distraction, but said he was satisfied with the CGIS complex as a whole.

“It’s growing on me slowly. Clearly, when they opened it, it wasn’t really ready yet,” he said. “Pretty consistently there was work going on throughout the day, but it wasn’t anything major... [The] fire alarm shenanigans were the first real technical problems I’ve experienced, although there is always a very loud banging in a pipe in the basement when I have class there.”

Despite these issues, Lieb added, “I think it’s a pretty usable space, and they did a good job of incorporating lots of light into the building.”

The CGIS, made up of the Knafel Building and the still-unnamed South Building, has been beset by difficulties throughout its short lifespan. Initially, disputes erupted between the City of Cambridge and the University over the planned location of the complex, and its effect on the areas around it. Original designs for a tunnel connecting the two buildings under the street were abandoned after they met with fierce local opposition that drove the price tag up by $10 million—a sum the College deemed unreasonable.

Additional delays and increasingly ambitious construction plans drove the costs up from the originally projected $30 million to a total of $140 million, and fragile details of the buildings, such as their already-cracking outer coating, are expected to keep maintenance costs high.

As for prevalent complaints about the temperature, Matthew P. Stec, Manager of Facilities for the Office of Physical Resources, said that the buildings were heated according to Harvard’s policy—between 68 to 72 degrees Farenheit—but suggested that the CGIS’ glass walls might make the rooms feel colder than they really are.

He added that most of the incomplete construction projects are beginning to wrap up. “The case study room was not yet ready...it was taken offline this semester because the contractors just hadn’t finished,” he said. “When we moved in there was a lot of work to do, a lot of work being done. I mean it was a challenge at first but now pretty much everything is done.”

And the mystery of yesterday’s fire alarms has been solved. “That was a faculty member cooking a bag of coffee in a microwave,” Stec revealed.

—Staff writer Alexandra C. Bell can be reached at acbell@fas.harvard.edu.