Harvard Student Housing | 10 Akron St | Harvard Square | Cambridge

[kennedy]

No one on this board has ever answered my question; why can't there be a stylistically modern building, that still interacts with the streets and contributes to a lively urban culture?

 

[Pierce]

i'd say the holyoke center does all that.

 

[ablarc]

No one on this board has ever answered my question; why can't there be a stylistically modern building, that still interacts with the streets and contributes to a lively urban culture?

i'd say the holyoke center does all that.

Sert again.

Difficult but not impossible.

Sert was from Catalonia, and they know what cities are there.

 

[InTheHood]

Good grief, more misplaced Sert worship.

The Holyoke Center is an awkward, compromised building even today, but anyone who knows the history of that building knows that it was a windswept bunker as designed, and had to be heavily reworked to be marginally functional after the overrated master was long in his grave.

Here's a snippet describing the overhaul of the Holyoke Center arcade from a Harvard University Gazette article from 2000:

"What was originally designed as nothing more than a windy thoroughfare linking Harvard Yard with the river houses has emerged as a bustling center of activity, shopping, food, and art. The transformation has taken time, money, and a great deal of strategic planning.

To fully appreciate the transformation, one must go back to the days when the arcade was an open-air passageway, devoid of any major retail use, and often filled with more transients than students. Nike Damaskos, the assistant director of leasing, who grew up in Cambridge, remembers the arcade as a dangerous and dank "wind tunnel" that repelled more visitors than it attracted.

"It was a dysfunctional space at the core of the campus," says Scott Levitan, director of university and commercial real estate. "It was a very challenging design problem to bring [the arcade] up to a standard that would be useful."

So do Catalonians innately know how cities function? Certainly Barcelona functions well as a city, but that seems 99% the accumulation of prior centuries' efforts, before the modernist cult took over. Is there any evidence that Sert had any grip on urban functionality, based on the tangible evidence provided by his work on the Harvard campus? The answer to that is a resounding "NO," unless we are to attribute intention to his success in providing the homeless with an abode slightly more approachable and less depressing than the one he designed for graduate students (Peabody Terrace).

Back to the buildings at hand: it's a cop out to blame zoning for the fact that Kyu Sung Woo's latest effort is as almost as much a bunker as its awful Corbu/Sert predecessors. Zoning doesn't require the damned hedges. Nor is retail the only possible means of creating street-level interplay (although it is often a good one). No, the problem is that for the starchitect, the "positive space/negative space" schtick takes precedence over functionality and approachability.

 

[Pierce]

I wouldn't "blame" zoning (or the architect) so much as just chalk it up to client wishes. The Harvard residential model is less Jane Jacobs' Manhattan and more King Henry's Cambridge. The new building is kind of a return to the historical (Harvard) pattern along Memorial Drive of inward focused, horseshoe shaped buildings that are rather indifferent to Mem. Drive and the river. Peabody Terrace and One Western Ave being notable breaks from that (mind you not necessarily complete breaks), whose near-universal unpopularity no doubt Kyu Sung Woo was fighting from day one. Without tipping my hand too much, I will say that I was a member of the design team in a not-major-but-not-minor way and that hedge is there mainly to reconcile the fence that had to be there, per Cambridge (whether it was the city or the neighbors or both, I can't remember). As i recall the hedge satiated some of Harvard's security concerns as well.

 

[kz1000ps]

This afternoon:

And now on to the park next door, which wasn't finished until a year or more after the buildings. Now don't let all the people in these pictures fool you; they were spillover from the fair going on further up Memorial Drive. But having said that, I was quite impressed with the space, which was broken up into varied and well-defined zones, and all the materials looked to be high quality.

 

[vanshnookenraggen]

If I didn't know any better I'd think these were taken from some Dutch housing project that we'd then gush over. I'm impressed, both with the design and the photos (great job kz).

 

[briv]

Van, I agree for the most part. But those triple-deckers are crap.

 

[kz1000ps]

I'd like to imagine that one day down the road when Harvard needs to build up they'll replace those triple-deckers with something along the scale of the Kyu Sung Woo building. The park already impresses, and it could be a truly great space with a five-story enclosure to its east. But yeah I know, this is Cambridge.....I'm done dreaming that dream.

 

[stellarfun]

Let's remember, the park is the roof of an underground parking garage.

 

[piggiston]

I live across the street from this housing (10 Akron St, the big one, not the triple deckers)... I need to read through this whole thread!

Nice photos, kz1000ps. I'm very happy with the park, and although in your photos there's some spillover from the river festival, I've never seen it empty when the weather is decent. I see the 10 Akron building out my window all day and I find it nice enough too, although it's a fairly dull view from this side. I've never found those triple deckers offensive, I guess because I got here after they were built, without being teased by something better.

 

[stellarfun]

The three deckers emulate the three deckers Harvard built on Grant St. several years prior. Google street view for Grant St.

Harvard's thumbs are kind of small. This is 5 Grant.

Larger images are flash.

http://www.huhousing.harvard.edu/5GrantStreetMA/TakeATour.aspx

 

[atlantaden]

kz, really nice pics thanks! Nice job by Harvard on both the housing and the park! As small as that park seems, it's packed with very cool stuff and smaller interesting areas. Hmmmmm, maybe one of the smaller Greenway parcels could be given over to the Harvard people to do a makeover!

 

[datadyne007]

The intimate scale of the park areas/greenspace is simply brilliant. I'll definitely get over to check this out this weekend. The list of sites to visit keeps growing longer in my notebook, but I'm gonna do it soon. =P

This one will be particularly useful because this semester is the site planning & landscape studio and we'll be designing a couple schools with landscaped outdoor spaces.

 

[kz1000ps]

I officially love this little park, and the building is pretty good too.

^ note how each bench has its own recessed nook up against shrubs; they may not look like much but they do wonders to create a sense of enclosure while you're sitting on them. If I were mayor/dictator this would be required everywhere.

 

[Beton Brut]

^ note how each bench has its own recessed nook up against shrubs; they may not look like much but they do wonders to create a sense of enclosure while you're sitting on them.

Indeed. Consider this against the piss-poor placement of benches on the Greenway, inches from traffic. Advantage, Cambridge.

 

[czsz]

The park is nicely designed, but is it at all active? The open space: resident ratio of this development is obscene. Don't let aesthetics cloud judgment of Greenwayesque urban planning flaws.

 

[Beton Brut]

I only like the bench-placement. I'd have preferred Piano's museum proposal from he late 90s.

Belated welcome back.

 

[Ron Newman]

Even though we're not having a real winter, February is not the ideal time to determine how well the park is being used. Let's take another look in May.

 

[GW2500]

^^ It gets used when its nice. And it is a nice park, but no more for this area, it's sufficiently open.