Harvard Graduate Center
The Harvard Graduate Center, also known as "the Gropius Complex" (including Harkness Commons), is a group of buildings on
For The Architects Collaborative (TAC), an important modernist firm headed by seven Harvard graduates and Walter Gropius (then chair of the University's Department of Architecture within the Graduate School of Design), the Center was one of their first important works.
The building contains work from avant-garde Surrealist or Bauhaus artists Joan Miró, Josef Albers, Jean Arp and Herbert Bayer. A sculpture by Richard Lippold is in a nearby courtyard.[1]
The buildings are now primarily used as a student center and as a dormitory complex for Harvard Law School.
Architecture
Located at the northern end of campus along Everett Street, the complex takes the traditional form of an academic quad with a modernist aesthetic, putting it at odds with the surrounding buildings.[2] It is made up of seven buildings (five of which are connected by hallways), arranged around two central green spaces. It contains Story Hall, Dane Hall, Holmes Hall, Richards Hall, and Child Hall.
The buildings' façades are yellow brick with a variegated-red brick watercourse and are defined by large ribbon windows.
Gropius's Influence
Coming from the
Gropius makes clear statements for employing ribbon windows, “…Our contemporary architectural conception of an intensified outdoor-indoor relationship through wide window openings and large undivided window panes has ousted the small, cage-like, 'Georgian' window.”[citation needed] Further, explaining why TAC designed the structures in a modernist style, Gropius said, “if the college is to be the cultural breeding ground for the coming generation, its attitude should be creative, not imitative.”[citation needed]
References
- ^ Article on Harkness Graduate Center Archived 2014-11-16 at the Wayback Machine on the Harvard Law School website. Retrieved 14 March 2013.
- ^ "THE ARCHITECTS COLLABORATIVE (TAC)". www.architecture-history.org. Retrieved 2022-04-05.
- “Graduate Center: Harvard University, Massachusetts,” Architects' Year Book (1953, vol. 5) London: P. Elek, 146.
- Nancy MacLennan, “Harvard Decides to ‘Build Modern’,” New York Times, 25 October 1948, 25.
- Walter Gropius, "Not Gothic But Modern For Our Colleges", New York Times, 23 October 1949.
- The Architects Collaborative; ed. Walter Gropius (and others). (Teufen, AR, Niggli, 1966). 63
