A Tour Around Harvard Campus

The museum is housed in the University Museum Building, located on the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It displays a sampling of specimens drawn from the collections of the University's three natural history research museums: the Harvard University Herbaria the Museum of Comparative Zoology the Harvard Mineralogical Museum. The museum is physically connected to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at 26 Oxford Street. This museum is the most visited museum at Harvard University. The museum starting collecting in 1858, and the current collection is about 21 million specimens.

Gund Hall, home of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, showcases innovative architectural elements for its time such as a poured concrete construction and a stepped, trussed glass roof that covers a vast studio space organized on five terraces, also known as “the trays”. Notably, the building rises to meet its neighboring Memorial Hall and includes a covered arcade for pedestrians on the Quincy Street facade. Gund Hall brought together the different divisions of the Design School under one clear-span roof, promoting communication and collaboration between departments. With its unique architectural expression and functional design, Gund Hall exemplifies an innovative approach to spatial organization and integration of diverse disciplines, making it an iconic structure within design education.

Sever Hall was built with 100,000 bricks and has elaborate brick carvings. The archway was built with unique acoustic properties. If you face the archway and whisper into it, it can be clearly heard on the other side of the archway. It now houses the film program and the Visual and Environmental Studies programs at Harvard.

The Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library is Harvard University's flagship library. Built with a gift from Eleanor Elkins Widener, the library is a memorial to her son, Harry, Class of 1907. Harry was an enthusiastic young bibliophile who perished aboard the Titanic. It had been Harry's plan to donate his personal collection to the University once it provided a suitable alternative to the outdated and inadequate library then located in Gore Hall. Mrs. Widener fulfilled her son's dream by building a facility of monumental proportions, with over 50 miles of shelves and the capacity to hold over three million volumes. The library opened in 1915, but Harvard's collections continued to grow at an astounding rate. By the late 1930s, Widener's shelves were at capacity. Space was at a premium for staff and patrons as well as books, which led the administration to begin a lengthy decentralization process. Over time Harvard built several new libraries to house its increasingly specialized collections. By redistributing books to new libraries, space opened up in Widener, but it was gradually given over to the growing staff hired to attend to the collections.

Harvard Yard is a 25-acre plot that encompasses the oldest buildings on the Harvard University Campus. The grassy area between Widener Library and Memorial Church is known as Tercentenary Theater. Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates recently worked with Harvard over the course of more than a decade to restore and redesign the planting and circulation scheme for the yard. Michael Van Valkenburgh continues to be involved with the future of this landscape through his participation in the Harvard Yard Soils Restoration Project, an ongoing effort to implement a biological soils program at Harvard.

John Harvard was an Englishman from the Southwark neighborhood of London. He emigrated to New England in 1637 but died of tuberculosis only one year later. He is buried in the Phipps Street Burial Ground in Charlestown. When Harvard died he bequeathed half of his fortune and his entire library to the new college that was founded in Cambridge. The college was named after him in 1638. Daniel Chester French (Massachusetts native who also created the Lincoln Memorial sculpture, among many other famous monuments) sculpted the John Harvard Statue, now known as the "statue of three lies" in 1884. The three lies are: 1) the sculpture is not of John Harvard because, of course, it was created 250 years after Harvard died. French used a student as a model. 2) The statue incorrectly states that the founding of Harvard was in 1638, not 1636. 3) The plaque lists Harvard as the founder of Harvard college, when he was in fact only a benefactor after the Massachusetts colonial government founded the college.

Harvard Square is a triangular plaza at the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue, Brattle Street, and John F. Kennedy Street, near the center of Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The term "Harvard Square" is also used to delineate the business district and Harvard University surrounding that intersection, which is the historic center of Cambridge."If you think it's a good idea to preserve the architecture of historic places, then Harvard Square presents a quandary. It's always been in a state of constant change. If you really want to preserve its essential character, shouldn't you wish it to keep changing? Does that qualify as preservation? Change it does, sometimes so fast it feels like a time-lapse film. Charles River Bank becomes Harvard Trust becomes BayBank becomes BankBoston becomes Fleet becomes Bank of America. Tweedy undergraduates in preppy jackets and ties give way to Goth-clad teens with pierced tongues. Mom-and-pop stores bite the dust, displaced by brand-name outlets that make today's square into a predictable outdoor mall. We're looking west on Mass. Ave. at snapshots of the square at two moments in its history. The 1906 photo was made for a postcard, one of a series put out by the Detroit Publishing Co. The square then was like a spider in his web: It was a hub for electric trolleys, powered from a network of overhead wires, that connected it with Newton, Watertown, Arlington, and Boston. Behind the closest trolley, we can see the triangular façade of the Harvard Cooperative Society. The Coop took over a building that was built in 1841 as the Cambridge Lyceum, a public lecture hall whose guests are said to have included Nathaniel Hawthorne. Today's Coop building replaced it in 1924, but its triangular pediment is probably the architect's homage to the old lyceum. Ghosts of the past linger in other ways. To the right of the Coop, in the newer photo, is the aluminum-finned façade of the Bank of America. That façade was applied in the 1950s, in an attempt at modernization, over the face of a brick neo-Georgian building of the 1920s, which in turn replaced the mansard-roofed dorm we see in the old photo. The ghost is the 1920s façade, parts of which you can still see if you look through the fins. It's as if the old building were behind prison bars. Cambridge city planners are doing a study of the square, hoping to improve it as a pedestrian environment, with wider sidewalks and easier street crossings. Further change, in short, is on the way." -Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - A History of Change," Boston Globe, 26 September 2004

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS "Before there was a Big Dig, there was a Little Dig – although it didn’t seem so little at the time. From 1979 through 1984, Harvard Square was virtually disemboweled. The MBTA’s Red Line, which had terminated at Harvard, was being extended to Porter Square, Davis Square, and Fresh Pond. The old photo shows Harvard Square at the worst of the upheaval. It reminds you of a medieval painting, with the earth perched precariously above a dark pit, where demons are ready to suck you down into damnation. The new photo shows – in the same location as that excavation – an area everyone calls ‘the Pit.’ It’s a paved, partly sunken area used mostly by teens, who have taken it over as their own public square. The name is either a coincidence or perhaps an unconscious memory of the days when the square was a gaping hole. In the background, the buildings appear unchanged. Only the bank name has disappeared. But in truth, the square has changed enormously in the years since the Red Line extension, morphing from a sleepy, funky college downtown into a sort of outdoor mall of national brand out lets. The architects who designed the new Harvard Square were the Boston office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (now defunct). They redid not only the underground station but also almost the whole surface of Harvard and Brattle squares, introducing new and wider brick sidewalks, kiosks, granite planters, lighting, and sculpture. Most of us refer to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority system of buses and subways simply as the T. Few realize that the name is a fairly recent coinage. The inventors of the term were another firm of architects, who call themselves the Cambridge Seven. Cambridge Seven Associates established much of the visual imagery of today’s MBTA in a brilliant design study done in 1968. The firm invented not only the T logo but also the color coding of the train lines – Red Line, Green Line, and so on - in imitation of the system in London. The name T derived from the architects’ observation that many relevant words began with that letter: transportation, train, ticket, trolley, tram, toll, etc. The firm also created the long-familiar (but now, alas, disappearing) yellow-stripe color scheme for T buses. The Seven’s color-coded maps, regularly updated, are still in use, and the ‘HARVARD: TO TRAINS AND BUSES’ sign in the new photo (badly in need of repair) is rendered in the Helvetica font the Seven picked for all the T graphics, a choice that has been widely imitated." -Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Harvard Square," Boston Globe, 2002 "Harvard Square may be the most vital little downtown in America. In its few blocks, it packs more life than most whole cities: 17 bookstores, 50 restaurants, and just about everything else. The Square works because Harvard trusts it. The university has never had its own student union or bookstore. It doesn't hide behind monastic walls. Instead, like its European counterparts - the Sorbonne, in France, or Oxford, in England - it reaches out to engage the ordinary commercial life of the city. Usually, you can't quite tell where Cambridge ends and Harvard begins, a fact that has sometimes caused friction. But, always, it has energized both town and gown. Christopher Alexander, a sharp observer of cities, once wrote: "When a university is built up as a campus, separated by a hard boundary from the town, it tends to isolate its students from the townspeople, and in a subtle way takes on the character of a glorified high school." Case in point: UMass, either Amherst or Boston. By contrast, Harvard, for all its elitism, has always been a participant in the city's life. The photos depict the hub of Harvard Square in 1920 and today. They show Cambridge, as usual, bucking a national trend: The Square has traded away cars in favor of pedestrians. The change occurred a dozen years ago, when the META tore up the Square to rebuild the underground Red Line station. Cambridge grabbed the chance to reroute traffic and open up space for pedestrians. Such districts usually fail in the United States, because our culture just doesn't generate enough pedestrians to keep these districts alive. Thanks to students, that's hardly a problem in Harvard Square. A round brick subway kiosk fills the foreground of the older view. It was the earliest of three kiosks here. Probably, it was removed to permit a street widening. The second one -was the copper-vaulted gem we can see behind the tour bus in the new photo. The copper kiosk isn't a subway entrance . anymore. It's now the home of the legendary Out of Town News (address: Zero Harvard Square). The third entrance isn't much more than a dark stairway into the nether world. It can be seen between those two mysterious cylinders, of which the one on the left is an information booth and the one on the right a subway elevator for the disabled. Random disorganization is the message of the new photo. Scattered with disparate objects, the Square looks like a dining- room table after a meal. Behind all the confusion looms Harvard's Lehman Hall (1925). Once the university bursar's office, Lehman, which is now a dining hall, is typical of Harvard architecture: unashamedly stagy. Its eight fancy white pilasters seem to be glued like makeup onto the face of the building - but they work, giving an otherwise modest building a big public scale. Like a billboard, the facade announces the presence of the university to the Square and evokes the presence of the old colonial landmarks, situated behind Lehman in the Yard, that are the arcfiitectural essence of Harvard." -Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Twon Meets Gown", Boston Globe, 1992

With the Holyoke Center (1958-1965), architect José Luis Sert set a new direction for increased density and large-scale modern architecture at Harvard University. Working closely with Werner Gumpertz on construction details, the building introduced radically innovative design to the building`s exterior envelope. It exploited the full potential of the 100` zoning envelope in place in Cambridge at the time, and has became the model urban design solution for expanding an institution on valuable city real estate. The building was first renovated in 1995 by Prellwitz Chilinski Associates which expanded commercial uses and character on street level. In 2000, it was renovated by Chan Krieger and Associates who added new lighting, new interior finishes, automatic sunshade control and new signage system. In 2008 Bruner/Cott with the engineering firm Simpson, Gumpertz and Heger created a comprehensive analysis of the building envelope performance to emphasize energy efficiency, and suggested strategies to markedly reduce heat loss and solar gain, improve resistance to wind and rain, and increase user comfort.

An inviting glass street wall and a crown of skylights announce the new home of Harvard University Library`s Weissman Preservation Center for some of the rarest books in the world, Information Systems offices, and a street level bookshop. The site on Mt. Auburn Street, surrounded by historic Harvard social clubs and Sert`s Holyoke Center, is at the very heart of pedestrian activity and energetically protected by the Cambridge Historic Commission and neighborhood groups. To balance competing community desires for a building in scale and size suited to the character of the street, and the university`s need for the maximum usable area for its programs, we created a carefully calibrated building with four stories above grade and two stories below using concrete flat slab construction to minimize overall building height. The new building projects an image of lightness and openness with its finely scaled and proportioned window wall facing Mt. Auburn Street. Along the sidewalk, a canopy protects the bookstore, display vitrines, and bookstore entry. At the top floor, sculptural skylights bring daylight into the Preservation Center. A new through block landscaped pathway links Mt. Auburn Street and Winthrop Street beyond. Sustainable design thinking played a critical role in winning community approval. The use of a geothermal heating and cooling system eliminating noisy and unsightly roof top mechanical equipment was a key to success for neighborhood groups. The north facing window wall and generous skylights minimize artificial lighting load, provide an ideal environment for the activities of the Preservation Center, and create a lively and open face to the street. After an extended community review process, members of the Cambridge Historical Commission dubbed the project “ a little jewel box.”

Littauer Center was designed by Architectural Resources Cambridge and opened in 1978. It was built for the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. The buildings is named for Lucius Littauer (1859 – 1944), an American politician, businessman and philanthropist. Since creating the Master Plan for the site in 1976, ARC has been at the center of development for Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Modeled after its neo-Georgian brick neighbors, the original courtyard concept is reminiscent of adjacent Harvard River Houses. Beginning with the 105,000 SF Littauer Center completed in 1978, three additional buildings brought the KSG campus to over 250,000 SF. Rising past classrooms, conference spaces and the School's library, the interior focus of Littauer and the KSG campus is the building's sky-lit atrium, originally known as the ARCO Forum. Twenty-five years later, the renovated and rededicated John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum offers multiple seating at three levels for hosting debates, television broadcasts and other events supporting the vital connection between the School and the real world of politics.

Harvard Stadium was completed in 1903, with modifications in the 1910s and 1920s. The structure is a designated National Historic Landmark, and is notable for its early use of monolithic reinforced concrete, its simple horseshoe shape, and its role in shaping the sport of American football. It is the oldest college football venue still in use. Construction of the Stadium was funded by the Harvard College class of 1879 and funds from the Athletic Committee. The building was constructed from funds provided by the Athletic Committee and the Class of 1879. "The WGU (World`s Greatest University, as a Globe columnist snidely dubs Harvard) is preparing to launch a major expansion into Allston, across the river from Cambridge. In the older photo, we show an early beachhead of that invasion, the Harvard Stadium of 1902. College football was the sport of the day, and WGU, hard as it is to believe, was a national power. WGU found it wasn`t easy to shoehorn a major sports facility into a crowded town. So the stadium was sited across the river, to be followed in the 1920s by the Harvard Business School. Today, unable to grow in Cambridge in the face of defiant neighborhoods, Harvard hopes to drag other schools – all of which are kicking and screaming – out of the magic ZIP code 02138. The stadium is a remarkable building. The entire exterior is wrapped in an arcade that is one huge chunk of poured-in-place concrete. The largest such structure in the world at the time, the stadium demonstrated the architectural potential of this new material, preceding, by two years, Frank Lloyd Wright`s great Unity Temple in Chicago. The stadium`s horseshoe shape, with classical details, recalled the theaters of ancient Greece and Rome, an association the young scholar-athletes must have enjoyed. A performance of Aeschylus`s Agamemnon, with live horses, took place here in 1906. The stadium`s lead architect was Charles McKim, designer of the Boston Public Library and Symphony Hall. In the foreground of the older photo is a rickety bridge across the Charles, with an operable span in the middle for coal and lumber barges. A bridge has stood in this location since 1663. The new photo, in which the stadium is obscured by more recent buildings, shows the Larz Anderson Bridge of 1913, designed by Edmund Wheelwright, best loved for his Harvard Lampoon building. Both photos were taken from an upper window of the Weld Boathouse of 1907. In its early days, Allston-Brighton was known as Little Cambridge. With Harvard`s anticipated expansion and investment in the community, it will perhaps, in a sense, be so again." -Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Harvard Stadium," Boston Globe, 9 July 2000

The Harvard Innovation Lab is a new model for collaboration and entrepreneurship that crosses all disciplines and a magnet with a campus-wide draw. Its design creates a catalyst for a robust culture of exploration and a program rich with team-based activities. Classrooms are complemented by a range of spaces that accommodate business incubators and entrepreneurs in residence while welcoming the surrounding community with social spaces and business support. The reconfigurable 'garage-chic' environment conveys a sense of the possible, adapting to evolving technologies and uses that range from community meetings to collaborative project work. Shepley Bulfinch's transformation of the WGBH television studios into the Innovation Lab was completed on a highly expedited schedule, with just seven months from a dynamic workshop-based design process to the end of construction, opening at the start of the 2011-12 academic year.