America's Tower of Architectural Power

The next time you walk in the shadow of glass and steel skyscrapers that tower over cities from Boston to Baton Rouge, mutter a little prayer of thanks--or even a curse--to Harvard's Graduate School of Design (GSD).

From Boston City Hall to the Science Center, from New York's AT&T building to Seattle Center, dozens of buildings and hundreds of acres bear the stamp of Harvard design.

At one time the premiere center of Modern, or International, style of architecture in the United States, the GSD has trained a generation of architects who have transformed the character of the American city. Even within the parameters of Harvard, architects associated with the GSD also designed the lion's share of campus buildings constructed during the 1960s and 1970s.

Though no longer the undisputed cynosure of American architecture, the GSD, which is celebrating its 50th birthday this year, can still claim to be one of the nation's leaders in architecture, landscape design, and city planning.

Designers trained by the GSD include many of the most recognizable names in American architecture: Philip Johnson '27 (BAR '43), Michael Graves (MAR '59), Ulrich Franzen (MAR '48), I. M. Pei (MAR '46). Throughout the years, GSD-trained designers have have staffed this country's top architectural firms, mostly on the East Coast.

Still, of Harvard's nine professional schools, perhaps only the School of Public Health receives less attention than the GSD. The school's size and location on campus may have something to do with its low-key presence. Roughly 450 graduate students and 45 professors labor in relative obscurity in the glass and concrete Gund Hall, built in 1972 by Philip Andrews (MAR '58).

Even the school's birth in the winter of 1936 was a relatively quiet event, a mere shuffling of papers and shifting of offices. That's because the three departments that now make up the GSD--architecture, landscape design, and urban planning--had already been in existence here for many years.

Harvard offered its first course in architectural design in 1893, and a full-fledged architecture school, the nation's seventh, materialized a mere two years later. The pioneering landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted founded the first program of Landscape Architecture in the country here.

Then in 1902 the fledgling programs got their own building, Nelson Robinson Junior Hall; the first American courses in city planning, an offshoot of landscape architecture, appeared just seven years later. With the introduction of this last great topic in design, the incipient school was complete--although city planning would not become a graduate school of its own until 1929.

In 1936, under the management of Harvard's newly-inaugurated president, James Bryant Conant '13, the three graduate schools merged into the present-day GSD. Although the move was intended to unite the three schools, it was most notable not as a bureaucratic change, but for drawing two of the world's best known designers into Harvard's architectural womb.

First came Columbia University architect Joseph Hudnut '09, who assumed the deanship of the newly-formed school. At the time, Hudnut was a hot ticket and his "lectures throughout the country were creating a sensation" according to GSD historian and visiting professor Anthony Alofsin '71. And then came Gropius.

The arrival of Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus and undisputed holder of the "Mr. Modernism" title, reinvigorated the department, remembers Len Currie (GSD '38). Though "Harvard has always been tops" in the field, Currie says, "in '36 architecture was at a low ebb." Squabbles in the faculty, the departure of the old dean of architecture, and the sad state of American design during the Depression had shaken the school's confidence. Gropius's arrival boosted morale, and Harvard soon rocketed to the to the forefront of international design.

The school's precipitous rise, and the influx of volatile new ideas on the meaning of architecture, bred a peculiar mixture of worldwide fame--and campus controversy. As the University entered a period of rapid institutional growth, Harvard administrators hesitated to abandon the Georgian Revivalist style of the old Yard and the river houses.

As a result, Gropius, the industrial modernist, did not design a single building on campus until his 12th year on the faculty, in 1948. In that year he started work on the Graduate Center at Harkness Commons, which although typical of Gropius's work, ultimately encountered severe criticism from alumni. "No possible stretch of the imagination can see any sign of beauty in these structures," one acerbic alum wrote at the time.

Hudnut and Gropius had a falling out soon after the war, a natural result of the friction between these two strong personalities and their ideas. Both departed the school within several years of each other.

The GSD's course stabilized, however, in 1953 with the appointment of Spanish architect Josep Lluis Sert as both dean of the GSD and of the architecture school. Not only did Sert design Peabody Terrace, Holyoke Center, and the Science Center, but the world-renown architect forged strong links between the GSD and the universal church of Modernism, the Congres Internationaux d' Architecture Moderne (CIAM).

Following Sert's departure amidst campus protests in 1969, the GSD entered a period of relative quiet, marked only by the move from Robinson to Gund Hall. Ironically, in later years Gund would gain the reputation as "the worst designed building on campus," after a series of leakage problems caused by inadequate maintenance and, yes, poor design.

Though the GSD only occupies one building, its spirit might be said to extend to many others on campus and in the area. In addition to Sert's work, the Countway Medical Library, Loeb Drama Center, and Pusey Library were all designed by Hugh Stubbins, Jr. (MAR '35). Even the controversial $52,000 Johnston Gatehouse was farmed out to a GSD grad, Graham Gund (MAR '68). In Boston, GSD buildings include the Federal Reserve Bank (Stubbins), Boston City Hall (Professors of Architecture Gerhard M. Kallmann and Noel M. McKinnell), and the John Hancock Tower (Professor of Architecture Harry N. Cobb '47 MAR '49).

Perhaps the GSD's most significant contribution has been by way of example. When the GSD was founded, American buildings were primarily done in the Beaux Arts style, a mish-mash of the architectural conventions of the past. Working architects were well aware of the International Style, thanks largely to the efforts of the Museum of Modern Art. Nevertheless, there was considerable resistance to it, both by clients and architects unfamiliar with the style, and unimpressed by what they had seen.

So when Gropius was appointed as head of the architectural program, the International style received in one stroke the legitimacy it had previously lacked in the United States. True, during this time it was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, another refugee from the Nazis and a former student of Gropius, who would design the greatest edifices of Modernism according to his famous formula "less is more." But it is doubtful that his buildings would have been so rapidly acclaimed without the implicit approval of Gropius and the Harvard name.

The aura of Harvard's architecture department silenced many doubters of these bare and square designs. The GSD was the ideal platform for the polemically inclined Gropius to promote the ideals of the Bauhaus. As it has done in many other fields, Harvard provided the official stamp of approval that helped make a revolutionary doctrine palatable to conservative American tastes.

The reorganization and modernization of the architecture program, begun before the GSD was founded and culminating in Gropius's not entirely successful "Bauhausization" of the curriculum, provided the model for teaching architecture in the post-war period. Even if one studied architecture somewhere other than Harvard, one still learned the principles Harvard taught, the way Harvard taught them.

During the 1960s other schools like Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell began to pose a serious threat to the hegemony of Harvard. Newly-founded architecture departments, often staffed by Harvard graduates, rapidly attained parity with the GSD.

While the GSD remained true to the spirit of reinforced concrete and the right angle during Sert's tenure--as evidenced in Peabody Terrace or Boston City Hall--orthodoxy was being questioned at schools like Pennsylvania (homebase of the influential architect and teacher Louis Kahn) and UCLA (where Charles Moore blended high design with neon glitz).

Even though Dean Hudnut coined the phrase "post-modern" in 1946, the GSD was not associated with any of the movements that sought alternatives to Modernism in the late 1960s and 1970s.

This relocation of the academic cutting edge did not seem to impair the education of graduates. According to Alan J. Plattus, a visiting professor of architecture at Yale, the GSD has tried hard to introduce variety into coursework. "Harvard has always been scared...of becoming too monolithic," he says, adding that sometimes the students "are benificiaries of more diversity than they can handle...the variety can dilute the experience."

Dean Gerald M. McCue believes that the GSD has regained its avant-garde position. "We are among the leaders, I think, in schools that are really probing how one blends the best of Modernism and the best of other classical periods at the same time," he says. "We are trying to rediscover the theoretical propositions which created architecturee at various eras," McCue says, "instead of copying the manifestations of that, trying to rethink what was being thought at that time."

But the various theoretical and stylistic changes never seemed to affect the education GSD students received. Lawrence Halprin (BLA '44) expresses typical sentiments: "What I got was a great sense of value systems, role models, attitudes and processes. The aesthetic system was not very important...you learn it as a background and then cast it off...the International Style never influenced me."

When most grads are asked to describe their time at the GSD, their answer inevitably boils down to one word: tough. "It was angst-ridden. It wasn't fun, but that's not why I was supposed to be there," says Janet Josselyn (MAR '84). "Part of the problem is that you come out overtrained," says Eugene Lew (MAR '61). But now that Lew has his own practice, he believes that "it's no question that the training paid off."

If students have any complaint, it is that "at the GSD one learns architecture, and not how to be an architect," says Brad Walker (MAR '85). "Many employers want an employee who knows how to function in their offices. [The GSD's] is not a vocational education."

And of course there is the Harvard name. "It definitely is a foot in the door," says Josselyn, who is working in a local office. Lew, on the other hand, believes that only "in the last 10 to 15 years the Harvard and mystique has made a difference."

Peter C. Krause and Benjamin R. Miller contributed to the writing and reporting of this article.