Harvard's Architecture Is Busch-League

To The Editors of The Crimson:

Harvard's last piece of self-congratulatory puffery about the new Busch-Reisinger (Harvard Gazette, October 4) compels me to protest a huge imposture, a hoax thrust upon us by University PR.

The systematic deceit goes back to the first unbelievable pronouncement that the Germanic Museum was no longer suitable for housing its collections because an adequate air-conditioning system would be too expensive.

Some 10 years and many millions of dollars later, having been promised a new and improved museum, the fraud is exposed: a handful of very ordinary gallery-spaces on the second floor of an enlarged Fogg.

During construction, incredulous that an adequate building could be pasted on the unlovely backside of the Fogg, we watched Gwathmey's sleek, even glib, three-story pastiche of high-tech and nostalgia emerge. We were grateful for its glancing homage to LeCorbusier and relieved, perhaps, that it was less bloodless than the original drawings.

But now that we see the penetralia, the first floor has replaced the old reading room with a less sunny one and added a new gallery to the Fogg, and the third floor is devoted to offices and storage. The second-floor "museum," all there is of the old Busch-Reisinger, can only be entered from the Fogg.

In sum, what hath Harvard PR and West German millions wrought? The noble two-story Naumburg Room in the Fogg has been closed to the public, to be filled with offices and filing cabinets. The magnificent old Germanic Museum on Kirkland Street provides a sumptuous abode for the Center for European Studies, air-conditioned, we presume.

But its cool, cloistered spaces, the casts of the great bronze doors at Hildesheim, are visited only by a few ghosts, like myself, from the glorious days of Charles Kuhn. "Es ist der Geist der sich den Korper baut" (spirit creates the body) can still be read on the facade, but today's spirit is one of greed. Werner Otto's name could hardly adorn an air-conditioning machine, no matter how expensive.

As a consolation, we now have another architectural event: the Inn at Harvard, so assertively obnoxious that the new Busch-Reisinger looks Gropius-like by comparison. A regular Bulkie Roll of a building with fake balconies and window frames, it spreads to fill a once-welcome open space. It is embellished with triangles, half-moons and every postmodern cliche except dollar signs.

At times like these, I yearn for a princely fortune in order not to bequeath it to my alma mater. Sanford Gifford '38