Harvard Law School - Northwest Corner complex | Cambridge

[czsz]

$1 million according to Fox 25.

Probably more if Harvard is forced to settle with Cambridge residents who assert the coincidental discoloration of their water supply had something to do with the move.

 

[kz1000ps]

 

[singbat]

thanks - nice pics as usual.

while you were in that neck of the woods did you get to Mass Ave above Porter? There are several very nice developments up there that are starting to make the stretch between Porter and rt 2 much less of a backwater.

 

[statler]

Is that front end of the building in the foreground really part of the original house? It seems like a poorly done later addition. Too boxy and plain to be 'true' Victorian.

 

[Ron Newman]

No. They are two separate buildings, which have temporarily been planted next to each other until they can be moved to their final locations.

 

[statler]

^^Ok, thanks, I thought that was the final location.

 

[czsz]

As of today, the parking garage on the site is no more.

 

[czsz]

email update:

For the remainder of the academic year, construction on the
Northwest Corner site will take place largely underground,
which means that progress on the project will not be visible to
the community.

To provide a sense of what the Northwest Corner building will
ultimately look like, this weekend we will begin constructing a
large wall near Pound Hall that replicates the stone facade we
have chosen for the new building. It is important to evaluate a
large representation of the facade at this stage of the
project

 

[kz1000ps]

Re: Harvard Law School - Northwest Corner complex

 

[czsz]

Re: Harvard Law School - Northwest Corner complex

Not much to see here for another year, at least. There's a mockup of the wall, though, now leaning against Pound Hall on the campus side.

 

[kz1000ps]

Re: Harvard Law School - Northwest Corner complex

I'll have to go back and look for it (the mockup). My camera battery was on its last legs by the time I got there, so I didn't bother to explore at all and just took a single shot of both of the northwest projects.

 

[unterbau]

Re: Harvard Law School - Northwest Corner complex


I took this pic a few weeks ago - didn't realize there was a thread for this.

 

[czsz]

Re: Harvard Law School - Northwest Corner complex

Campbell chimes in. I don't agree with his comments about the "theatrical" archways: they're the building's most human element by far, and its most explicit recognition of the theme extending through Austin and Hauser Halls. In fact, it's the rest of the building that looks like the problem in this rendering: blocky and imperious, it looks like something Mussolini would have ordered up for his infamous EUR development.

Solving an identity crisis
Building aims to give law school a sense of place

By Robert Campbell
Globe Correspondent / February 10, 2008

CAMBRIDGE - "There's no there there when you come to Harvard Law School," says the school's dean, Elena Kagan, riffing on Gertrude Stein's famous line about Oakland, Calif. "All the buildings face in different directions."

It's true. Harvard Law School looks like a little village of buildings of different sizes and kinds. Some are quite good, but they all seem to be trying not to look at one another, and they're dwarfed by the bulk of the school's one large building, a pompous pile known as Langdell designed in 1906. There's nothing you could call an outdoor gathering place, like Harvard Yard or Harvard's many other green quads. Outdoor space is a confusion of asphalt roads and paths.

In this situation, a successful new chunk of architecture must do more than accommodate the functions it's being built for. It must also gather itself and its surroundings into a coherent whole, giving the law school what it's never had: a campus with a sense of place and a visual identity.

That's the goal of a new building now under construction on the site of a former parking garage (and a couple of houses that Harvard moved), at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Everett Street in Cambridge. The architect is Robert A.M. Stern, a New York practitioner who is also dean of the Yale School of Architecture. It's always hard to judge a building before it's finished, but the "Northwest Corner Building," as it's known until a donor comes forward, looks like a promising success.

Stern is sometimes called "the Ralph Lauren of architecture;" at least he was so named in a recent headline in a New York newspaper. He's long been known for building mansions for the rich in a variety of what you might call "preppie" styles - well-mannered and traditional. Recently he was selected as the architect of the George W. Bush Presidential Library. In our part of the world, though, he's best known for his work at the Harvard Business School.

Stern in the past has offered a standard rap on Harvard. He says Harvard began with the buildings of the Yard, 18th-century structures in the Georgian or Colonial style (those are synonymous terms), handsome but simple, usually red brick, often with white or pale trim, sometimes with a cupola. He says that's Harvard's brand image. He argues Harvard wisely continued the Georgian brand in the river dorms - the so-called "houses" - and in the original Business School of the 1920s, but then foolishly departed from it in the modernist buildings, often made of concrete, of more recent decades.

In the two large projects he's done for the Harvard Business School, the Spangler Center and Baker Library, both neo-Georgian, Stern considers that he's restored Harvard's proper and memorable brand.

But at the Law School, "We don't have a brand," announces Dean Kagan. She points out the wide disparity of styles in the school, from the very first building, Austin Hall of 1884, by the great architect H. H. Richardson, up through modernist works, including several by Walter Gropius and by his onetime partner, Benjamin Thompson, the creator of Boston's Faneuil Hall Marketplace.

more stories like thisIt's nice to report that Stern doesn't do a Georgian building, thus adding one more ingredient to this mixed salad of styles. Nor has he done anything flashily contemporary. He's done the kind of building that we don't see enough of in this age of so-called "starchitects." It's a background building, not an architectural adventurer strutting on a stage. It's a building that's devoted not to impressing you, but rather to housing a very diverse set of interior functions and, at the same time, organizing the campus around it.

The functions are many: classrooms, seminar and conference rooms, offices for student publications, large meeting and social spaces, a branch of the Harvard Coop, all kinds of student services, dining and leisure facilities, pro bono clinics, underground parking for 698 cars, and more. At one end, Northwest links up with and more or less absorbs Harkness Commons, the student center designed by Gropius and his firm in 1952.

Northwest Corner, in short, is not a single-function building, it's a m?lange of many purposes, and it looks, in fact, rather like three or four buildings that have been plugged into each other. It tries hard to respond to everything around it. Its outer walls are high - five stories -and solid along Mass. Ave., holding the street edge and the corner as they should, but stepping back at the upper floors so as not to overwhelm.

At each end of Northwest, along Mass. Ave., there are prominent entrance doorways. Thus for the first time the Law School will address the public world, from which it has always seemed to be hiding. On its inner edge, by contrast, Northwest wraps three sides of a quiet private plaza, which sits on top of a loading dock, which, in turn, sits atop the underground parking.

The most dramatic move is an endeavor to give the Law School a new central quad. A wing of Pound Hall, one of the Thompson buildings, is being demolished to create some open space. Northwest, where it fronts this future green quad, billows forward in a gentle curve that gives the space a memorable shape and an accent.

And the architectural style? It's an unpretentious vernacular Stern has used before, for example on a courthouse in West Virginia. It's a style sometimes called "stripped classicism," using traditional materials and shapes but without period ornament. The exterior walls are buff Indiana limestone, making a visual rhyme with the cooler limestone walls of Langdell and also with some parts of other older buildings. Those rhymes begin to tie the Law School into a semblance, at least, of unity.

The only examples of look-at-me, self-conscious design are those two entrances on Mass. Ave.: They're cloistered porches with wide archways, as if the designer had once been traumatized by Oxford and Cambridge. The arches, once again, rhyme visually with a Richardsonian motif, used at Austin Hall, but to this observer they look theatrical.

Why do universities keep expanding when they keep telling us they aren't going to add more students? Kagan gives several reasons. One, the desire for smaller, more interactive classrooms, and therefore more of them, instead of the old big lecture halls. Two, the desire for a lower teacher-student ratio and therefore more teachers. Three, the desire to bring scattered functions back into the school, such as student publications and the student pro bono clinic (now in Jamaica Plain). Four, an ever-growing menu of speakers, symposiums, and research projects. Five, the desire to improve the quality of student cultural and social life, in the hope of keeping students hanging around the school at all hours instead of disappearing into their homes.

"We chose Stern," says Kagan, "because we thought his buildings on other campuses brought people together."

In a semi-traditional building like Northwest, a lot depends on the quality of craft and construction. Harvard, as a presumably enduring institution, once built for the ages. Now it sometimes listens too hard to the professional cost-cutters. Whether we'll see a shallow stage-set or a rich, solid, convincing work of architecture is something we won't know until the predicted opening in July 2011.

 

[vanshnookenraggen]

Re: Harvard Law School - Northwest Corner complex

After seeing Stern's 15 CPW I have to say that this is going to probably turn out to be a wonderful building.

 

[czsz]

Re: Harvard Law School - Northwest Corner complex

The materials will doubtless be fairly nice, but the massing of this one is so dissimilar to 15 CPW - whereas the latter is flighty and elegant, the overwhelming horizontal elements here make it seem like a metastasizing cancer of stone.

 

[awood91]

Re: Harvard Law School - Northwest Corner complex

i would say that mass. ave is wide enough for this building to be at least one floor higher.

 

[kz1000ps]

Re: Harvard Law School - Northwest Corner complex

yesterday

looking in from the southeast corner

 

[stellarfun]

Re: Harvard Law School - Northwest Corner complex

The slurry wall looks to be done.

The two houses and carriage building that got put on wheels and moved up the street:

First, the old motel. I believe they truncated this.

At first, I wasn't sure if they had used a pre-cast faux granite for the foundations, but I decided its the real thing. Although I think they had largely ceased using granite as a house foundation by the time these houses were originally built. Maybe Harvard ought to buy SCL and teach Mr. Druker a thing or two about preservation.

 

[kz1000ps]

Re: Harvard Law School - Northwest Corner complex

Not much to see here..

 

[czsz]

Re: Harvard Law School - Northwest Corner complex

Despite the Allston debacle, this is still under construction, and hopefully on schedule for 2011 completion. They're currently working on an underground parking garage, which is why there's no street level activity.

HLS apparently had plans for other buildings, but put them on hold due to the recession. The wing of Pound Hall that was due for demolition will stay for the time being.

And the one-story building on Mass. Ave. just north of the construction site might be transformed soon. Harvard scrapped the leases of the tenants and is telling them to vacate, one by one.