New Harvard Economics building

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RandomWalk

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The new Economics building located between the Littauer Center and Austin Hall, near the Science Center, has started construction. It is slated for completion in 2027.

Major funding was provided by Penny Pritzker, so it will probably end up with Pritzker in the name.

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Is there a name, address, and any documents about what its going to look like?
 
Paging Robert Stern!

Hes built a few beautiful brick buildings around Harvard that nobody knows are relatively recent unless youre super deep in the weeds. No reason he couldnt deliver another one here.

Those new buildings in Allston yards are not exactly a glaring beacon of a warm, welcoming, human scaled, addition to the campus. Theyre not exactly on a roll lately. They should just keep with the collegiate gothic… well in Harvards case collegiate federal? You really cant go wrong. Literally everybody loves that style and its been successful for hundreds of years. Does anyone on planet earth not like federal style architecture? Harvard is world renowned for it, why deviate from that so much? That thing above isnt completely horrendous, but they can for sure do much better imo.
 
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stick n move said:
Paging Robert Stern!

Hes built a few beautiful brick buildings around Harvard that nobody knows are relatively recent unless youre super deep in the weeds. No reason he couldnt deliver another one here.

Those new buildings in Allston yards are not exactly a glaring beacon of a warm, welcoming, human scaled, addition to the campus. Theyre not exactly on a roll lately. They should just keep with the collegiate gothic… well in Harvards case collegiate federal? You really cant go wrong. Literally everybody loves that style and its been successful for hundreds of years. Does anyone on planet earth not like federal style architecture? Harvard is world renowned for it, why deviate from that so much? That thing above isnt completely horrendous, but they can for sure do much better imo.
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The schools out there that have leaned into the collegiate revival look seem to go more gothic over federal (Yale, Vanderbilt, BC etc). I’m sure there are some great examples out there of neo-Federalist architecture but too often it’s a misfire.
 
Yea one would have to be Robert Sterns bloomberg center expansion at harvard in 2005.

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Baker Library | Bloomberg Center — Robert A.M. Stern Architects, LLP

Baker Library was designed by McKim, Mead & White and completed in 1927 as the centerpiece of the Harvard Business School campus. Our renovation and addition reconceived the building as a 160,000-gross-square-foot center for research and group study, ...
www.ramsa.com www.ramsa.com

There was a more experimental time period in the 2010’s where some kitschy stuff got built and sometimes it still happens, but within the last few years its been getting exponentially better. Youre starting to see a legit movement bubbling up below the surface and the quality is getting much better. Thats just in the us, in Europe theyve gotten much more time under their belt and are doing an amazing job. Plus theyre doing full on rebuilds like the budapest palace and associated accessory buildings plus the berlin schloss or notre dame. So theres also architects outside of the US that are available too doing amazing work.

The sky is the limit these days you can get whatever you want from some crazy futuristic twisting glass building with automatic sun shades to a perfectly crafted neoclassical building with passive house rating and modern construction.
 
For the sake of displaying the transparency of this project, I've been following this in the What's Happening on Project X thread for quite some time, with little additional information to provide:

stefal said:
I don't see a general Harvard University projects page on here. I was scrolling through the Harvard Town Gown report from 2023. There's a new $100M building by Grafton Architects with Perry Dean Rodgers as the Executive Architect. It is around 100K square feet, near the existing Littauer Center. Based on the area of usable square footage there, at a conservative level, you can likely expect at least 3-4 stories. This project's been pretty quiet, but a groundbreaking for some early enabling work should be starting in the coming months ("Fall 2024"), so we should be expecting some design documents being posted somewhere sometime soon, I'd presume. That, or at least some renderings from a press-release. I'm interested to see what Harvard's architecture for new-construction on their "main campus" (not Allston) looks like. Grafton Architects has a pretty distinct look, and they use a lot of brick (and seemingly, stairs). Should be interesting.
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stefal said:
An update on this: some time after this post, I walked by the site, and they had all the utilities and comms painted out. At least for a week now, the site has been fenced off, so I believe an early release package for site/utilities work has been initiated. I still don't see much new info online about this.
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stefal said:
Would love to get a thread started on this once there are details. You'd figure with a new building project starting in 3 months there'd be some detail, apart from a start date.

I walked by the site this weekend and looks like the contractor's pretty much done with early utility work. There's a small fenced in ad-hoc construction yard on-site with some equipment and a trailer left.

Harvard to Break Ground on Pritzker-Funded Economics Building in June 2025​



This "weak" source puts the value at $67M: https://www.construction.com/projects/dr-202100781209-harvard-university-pritzker-economics-building
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stefal said:
Following up on this, there was a non-public (as far as I'm aware) groundbreaking Friday, per the utility project construction notes.
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My suspicion, based on Yale's recent announcement around funding concerns and construction, and Harvard's scrutiny in the media recently, and historically on Penny Pritzker herself, is that this will remain pretty quiet for some time.

Grafton Architects is a good firm. I have some hope what they deliver will be good quality design, and some variety is nice for a sprawling campus like Harvard's, especially for the Law and Engineering Campuses. They have some neo-classical works, and some contemporary work sprinkled in. A campus overloaded with neoclassicism can start to feel subconsciously monotonous, so a bit of contrast could be a healthy thing.

That said, the render in the Town Gown 2024 report is a tad concerning.
 
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