Architect Opposes Sackler Bolts

Most students walking by the Sackler Art Gallery probably haven't notice the bolts on top of the columns in front of the building. But for Philip A. Rizzo, an independent architect in Cambridge, they are "offensive" and an "urban blight" which the University needs to conceal or remove.

When the British architect James Sterling first designed the building the pillars were constructed as the foundation for a pedestrian bridge to be built between the Sackler and the Fogg Art Museum across the street.

But according to Rizzo, who received his masters degree from Harvard in 1988, since the walkway was never built, "bolt caps" should be placed over the exposed bolts.

"These bolts are clearly unfinished hardware to be concealed within the future foot bridge," Rizzo said in a letter to President Neil L. Rudenstine last month. "As an alumnus, I find these unfinished items offensive, particularly in such a prominent, highly visible entrance location," Rizzo wrote.

Rizzo also said the "left-over" items of the building are offensive to the people who walk around the area.

"It's a hideous insult to the reasonable expectations of the people of this city to be forced to accept an incomplete hardware solution as a permanent fixture on the cityscape," Rizzo said in an interview yesterday.

But a member of the Harvard faculty says the bolts, as they stand, can actually be considered an aspect of modern architecture.

"I think they are terrific the way they are. They exhibit the unfinished quality of the building which is actually an aspect of modern architecture," said Neil Levine, Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Fine Arts.

"You can read them as modern columns," Levine said. "I think they're great."