Building Harvard

When former Dean of the Harvard Business School John McArthur approached Moshe Safdie with a request to redesign the school’s campus, the architect was surprised. From a distance, the campus already seemed “quite good,” as Safdie — who was a professor and the Director of Urban Design at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design — said, simply, in an interview with The Crimson.

After all, the brick and white-columned buildings had only been constructed roughly 70 years earlier, when the size of HBS — founded in 1908 (fairly young among Harvard’s schools) — began to warrant its own facilities.

While Harvard’s campus boasts myriad architectural styles, very few buildings themselves exhibit multiple architectural styles as dramatically — and beautifully — as the Harvard Art Museums.

Nestled just off the center of campus and neighboring the Carpenter Center — Le Corbusier’s only North American building — the Harvard Art Museums elegantly combines both new and old.

From Harvard Yard, the museum looks like many other buildings on campus. It has a Georgian façade and a red-brick exterior. It’s stately. It’s quintessentially “Harvard.” However, should one approach the museum from Prescott Street, or even from the nearby 485 Broadway, one sees a very different structure.

Close your eyes and ask yourself, “What does Harvard look like?”

What do you see? Brick buildings, perhaps? Iron gates, Corinthian columns, sweeping façades? You’d be right if you conjured any of the above images, but the campus isn’t just made out of bricks.

In an interview with The Crimson, Haden Guest, a senior lecturer in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies (AFVS) and the director of The Harvard Film Archive (HFA), posed and offered an answer to that very question: “They think about the Yard, about Widener. They think about neoclassicism or fabulous style. They think about these ‘classical’ styles. They don’t think about modernist or brutalist architecture.”