As the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, Harvard has emerged as one of the world's most well-known universities. Organized into ten academic faculties and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, it is spread across 200 acres and centers on Harvard Yard in Cambridge. Developed along the Charles River adjacent to the Allston neighborhood of Boston, Harvard has the largest financial endowment of any academic institution. This has supported a number of different campus building projects across the university’s history.
The following survey takes a closer look at the architecture of Harvard and some of its most prominent campus projects. From Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center to the university’s newest additions, the designs explore larger themes of history and construction as they are manifested through the built environment. Representing a wide array of programs and spaces, the projects examine Harvard’s campus through multiple scales. Together, they reveal an evolving morphology designed and developed throughout the last fifty years.
Harvard Art Museums Renovation and Expansion / Payette + Renzo Piano Building Workshop
Harvard University’s three art museums – the Fogg, the Busch-Reisinger and the Arthur M. Sackler – were consolidated into one reorganized and upgraded facility, Harvard Art Museums, on the former site of the Fogg Museum on Quincy Street. The restored historic courtyard of the Fogg Museum is at the heart of the 200,00 square foot museum space. The new facility combines the Fogg’s protected 1920’s Georgian revival building, with a new addition on its east side, along Prescott Street. A new glazed rooftop structure bridges the old and the new.
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts / Le Corbusier
The first and only building in the United States designed by the 20th Century architect Le Corbusier sits among some of the oldest buildings that date back to before the United States was organized. Completed in 1963, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts is located on Harvard University's campus. Designed in conjunction with Chilean architect Guillermo Jullian de la Fuentes and Josep Lluis Sert - dean of Harvard's GSD at the time, the Carpenter Center stands out among the traditional architectural styles of Harvard Yard as a combination of Le Corbusier's earlier modernist works.
Harvard HouseZero / Snøhetta
The Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities (CGBC) at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) completed HouseZero, the retrofitting of its headquarters in a pre-1940s building in Cambridge into an ambitious living-laboratory and an energy-positive prototype for ultra-efficiency to understand buildings in new ways. The design of HouseZero has been driven by radically ambitious performance targets from the outset. Snøhetta was the project’s lead architect and Skanska Teknikk Norway was the lead energy engineer.
Harvard ArtLab / Barkow Leibinger
Harvard University’s ArtLab, a cross-curriculum space for the arts, is located on the school’s Allston campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Designed to be curated and adapted by its users, the 9,000 square-foot space will be available to students, teachers, visiting artists, and the wider community. The building, a one-story “pinwheel-like” plan, consists of a series of studios, workshops, and media spaces that surround a common “Hub” space.
Peabody Terrace / Sert, Jackson & Gourley
Built in 1964 during his tenure as Dean at the Graduate School of Design, Josep Lluís Sert’s Peabody Terrace provides housing for almost 1500 Harvard graduate students and their families. One of several projects Sert designed for Harvard’s campus, it is a manifestation of his vision for the ideal neighborhood. Many elements such as the negotiation of scale, mixed use program, shared open space and design aesthetic were influenced by but represent a departure from earlier modern housing projects.
Harvard Innovation Lab / Shepley Bulfinch
For the Harvard Innovation Lab, or i-lab, Shepley Bulfinch worked towards the concept of “Day 1”—the idea that the project launched the day students, faculty, and the community began using and shaping the space. Dubbed as the “Grand Central Station for entrepreneurial thinking” by Cherry Murray, dean, Harvard’s School of Engineering, the i-lab promotes team-based activities among Harvard students, faculty, entrepreneurs, and members of the Allston and Greater Boston community.
Harvard Plaza / Stoss Landscape Urbanism
The Plaza at Harvard University is a gathering space at the heart of the university, designed to serve students, faculty, staff, visitors, and the local community. Sitting atop the Cambridge Street Underpass, the site connects the historic Harvard Yard with the University Science Center and North Campus. Replacing an underutilized and derelict field, the new space offers a high-performance surface, accommodating utilities, water, and heat management in an articulated ground plane that responds to storm water drainage and local circulation flows.
Gund Hall Extension / Herzog & de Meuron and Beyer Blinder Belle
The Harvard Graduate School of Design (Harvard GSD) has selected Herzog & de Meuron and Beyer Blinder Belle as the design team for a “significant transformation” of the School’s iconic Gund Hall campus building. The proposed expansion will include the integration of a new space into the School’s existing structure, with the goal of creating a facility which “will embody the School’s visionary and cross-disciplinary work at the intersection of design, pedagogy, research, and practice."
Tozzer Anthropology Building / Kennedy & Violich Architecture
The new Tozzer Anthropology Building is a 35,000 square foot transformation of an existing library building which houses faculty and graduate student offices, a library, classroom and seminar spaces, and provides accessibility to an adjacent museum complex. The building is located at the end Divinity Avenue across the Street from Divinity Hall and in the middle of University Museum, a large courtyard building made up of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and the Harvard Museum of Natural History.
