After Harvard, Bond Builds Reputation as Architect

In the past four years, many different blueprints have been discussed for the memorial site at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan, where the World Trade Center once stood.

The site will be targeted to people with a multitude of needs, from those who lost their families in the Sept. 11 attacks to visitors in the distant future, who might be learning about the attacks for the first time.

At last, the current vision for the site as a memorial has been selected, after much heated debate in New York. Now, to transform that idea into reality requires vast technical knowledge and the collaboration of various experts in architecture.

J. Max Bond, Jr. ’55, a renowned architect based in New York, is one of those experts who is working to make the plans feasible.

This work is the most recent in a series of projects for Bond which have tackled a number of sensitive issues­­—including his previous work developing the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum and the crypt for Martin Luther King, Jr. in Atlanta, Ga.

While an undergraduate at Harvard, Bond was certain of his career path­—he enrolled at the Graduate School of Design (GSD) after graduation—and says that he had some positive experiences with professors who had engaged him in his course material.

But his time at Harvard was not entirely rosy­. As one of 11 black undergraduates, he coped with an atmosphere of tension about racial issues, and the occasional severe manifestation of prejudice.

A MIXED EXPERIENCE

Bond says that he found his academic experience at Harvard “very interesting and challenging.”

In particular, he says that he enjoyed a class in comparative literature on 19th-century Russian playwrights, as well as his science and math courses.

But Bond always had architecture on his mind. Theodore H. Evans—a member of the class of 1955 who lived on Bond’s floor in Stoughton Hall—recalls, “He was very focused on his career as an architect, I remember that...Also he was a very good bridge player.” He adds that the two used to take trips to his parents’ house on Cape Cod.

But while Bond was comfortable in the classroom and with a select group of friends, he says that the overall social environment at Harvard sometimes left him less at ease.

Bond says that the black students at Harvard in the 1950s were a closely-knit group socially and politically.

The Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision was forthcoming while he and his friends were studying for exams during his junior year.

“I can remember that some of us were distracted,” he says.

He says that overt prejudice was not the major issue for him­—though he felt sporadic outbursts of discrimination and he says that the atmosphere was not fully inclusive.

Speaking in his thoughtful, soft-spoken tone, he discusses an incident of cross–burning outside his dorm in February of his freshman year­—which had been conducted by his fellow freshmen as a “prank.” The five-foot-high burning cross was placed outside Stoughton Hall, where nine black students lived in 1952.

Bond and others at the time did not report the incident to the University, but about three weeks later wrote a letter to The Crimson describing the event.

Bond and classmate James Bows, Jr. ’55 wrote, “Some of the onlookers cheered when, after ten minutes, the cross was knocked down, but we are sorry to say that others expressed indignation at its destruction. Minutes later a Negro student passing thru the Yard was hailed with remarks such as might be expected in the Klan-dominated states of the South.”

They added that they had hoped another freshman would report the event to the administration, but after the three weeks of their classmates’ silence, Bond and Bows decided to decry the incident publicly.

Once the event was made known, the dean of freshmen responded with a categorical condemnation of the students’ actions, as did many students across the campus, including several progressive groups who signed an anti-cross burning petition in March 1952. Yet the effect of the cross-burning, as Bond and Bows wrote, was “a disgrace to the University.”

While Bond says that he enjoyed his academics at Harvard, not all professors were supportive of his goals. According to an article in the Washington Post, one attempted to discourage him from his career goals on the grounds that there had “never been any famous, prominent black architects.”

“I had some good experiences with some good professors...others, not so good an experience with,” Bond says.

But he is quick to relate that the friends he developed at Harvard, white or black, are still some of his closest.

PURSUING HIS GOALS

After graduating from Harvard, Bond continued to pursue his interest in architecture at the GSD, where he received his master’s degree in 1958.

Bond then studied in France with the Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier—whose only building in North America is Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts—on a Fulbright Scholarship.

After a short stay in New York, Bond then pursued a long-standing interest in working in Africa and took a teaching position at the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana.

Bond advises students interested in architecture to “try to do something after graduation that’s a little bit different from what one would normally do.”

Bond calls his days teaching in Kumasi “a wonderful experience.” He particularly admired the school’s policy of providing employment and research opportunities for its students.

DEVELOPING A STYLE

While working in Ghana, Bond designed the Bolgatanga Library, his first major project. The library was designed with an unusual open roof plan.

Some of his other projects include the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.

He also worked on the expansion of the Harvard Club of New York in midtown Manhattan and research facilities for Harvard Medical School (HMS).

For HMS, Bond’s firm, Davis Brody Bond, developed two buildings, including the Harvard Institute of Medicine. This required him to perform an unusual task: converting the 11-story Boston English High School into a research building for the University.

Bond was also charged with expanding the Harvard Club of New York just two years ago. The project generated controversy, as some club members said that the design was inconsistent with the feel of the older portion of the club, built in the mid-to-late 1890s.

Bond and his supporters successfully defended his design.

“We felt that the building should represent its culture,” Bond told The Crimson in 2003. “We tried to understand what it is that is relevant to today’s culture, to today’s issues. Buildings represent their era not only in terms of how they are built...but also in social mores of the time.”

Bond’s style has been described as eclectic, a description he finds amusing. He says that he considers his work to be a hybrid of several different styles.

“[American] culture is based on influences of people from all over the world,” Bond says. “I try to do designs that reflect that complex nature of our culture.”

Rather than simply take the historicist approach some of the members of the Harvard Club of New York favored, Bond considers the social and political contexts of the buildings he designs. In addition to aesthetic qualities, Bond examines the functionality of the building, and the culture of the people who will use and appreciate it.

“I would argue that’s a very modern attitude. I would say that it’s American in that sense. American in an inclusive sense, not an exclusive sense,” he says.

Bond designed the main reading room of Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in an octagonal shape, calling to mind the octagonal shape of the old churches that slaves built in the 18th and 19th centuries.

He used woods from Africa and local woods from the South in the paneling and furniture of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center and the Schomburg Center.

He says that he often uses simple materials like brick and concrete in his work. One benefit of using such materials, Bond says, is that there is a greater chance of local black masons working on the construction, benefiting the local economy.

“[For the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change] we tried to make even the choice of materials and the form of the building relate to Dr. King’s life and mission. Though his crypt is on the site, it is in a pool of water. Movement of water is meant to represent a continuation of life and the struggle for human rights,” Bond says.

THE MEMORIAL

Bond stresses that the work on the World Trade Center Memorial is a collaborative effort. Entitled “Reflecting Absence,” the memorial will consist of two reflecting pools in the footprints of the Twin Towers, and it will be surrounded by deciduous trees. The pools will be accessible to visitors by ramps, and surrounding the pools will be the names of the deceased, placed without any particular order.

Michael Arad, an Israeli-born architect, and Peter Walker, a prominent landscape architect, conceived the plan which Bond will execute.

The battle to produce the designs for this project was lengthy and highly publicized in the years after Sept. 11, when New York made the submissions process an open contest, as opposed to soliciting designs from particular firms.

“One of the things that’s important to realize is that every competition design goes through typically a huge evolution. You have to extract an idea and make it clear. So the design that resulted from the competition by Arad and Walker is a very strong design, but part of our job is to deal with all the issues, to build it and to make it work,” Bond says.

He adds that he feels that given the stressful circumstances, the project has been going very well.

He and his collaborators are facing a number of difficulties with the execution of the plans, including the question of how to control the flow of visitors and give them places to stop and rest, and how to manage the security issues of lower Manhattan.

But Bond says that he has faith that the design will be executed, regardless of the obstacles it faces.

­—Staff writer William L. Jusino can be reached at jusino@fas.harvard.edu.