Peabody Terrace

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Coordinates: 42°21′58″N 71°6′56″W / 42.36611°N 71.11556°W / 42.36611; -71.11556
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42°21′58″N 71°6′56″W / 42.36611°N 71.11556°W / 42.36611; -71.11556

View from southwest across the Charles River

Peabody Terrace, on the north bank of the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a Harvard University housing complex primarily serving graduate students, particularly married students and their families. Designed in the brutalist style[1] and constructed in 1964, its three-story perimeter grows to five and seven stories within, with three interior 22-story towers.[2]

It has been described as "beloved by architects and disliked by almost everyone else."[3]

Description

Peabody Terrace was completed in 1965 at a cost of $8.5 million.[2] On 5.9 acres (2.4 ha), the 650,000-square-foot (60,000 m2) complex consists of about 500 apartments (a mixture of "efficiencies" and one-, two-, and three-bedroom units‍—‌all with 7-foot-6-inch (2.3 m) ceilings) plus playgrounds, nurseries, roof terraces, laundromats/laundry rooms, meetings/seminar rooms, study rooms, and a parking garage.[2] In order to maximize usable floor space and speed vertical transportation, the towers' elevators stop on every third floor.[4] The Harvard-affiliated Peabody Terrace Children's Center is housed on the complex grounds.

Reception

In the words of architecture critic

Unité d'Habitation".[5]

Originally designated as housing for married students, the partially completed project appeared in a

Holyoke Center.[6] Nonetheless it received the Boston Society of Architects' Harleston Parker Medal and the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal.[2]

In 1965 Progressive Architecture said Sert had achieved "an efficiently workable interior arrangement, a lively sequence of exterior spaces, and a fluent continuity from low to high, and from old to new structures."[7] But by 1994 the same publication saw Peabody Terrace as "an embarrassment to Harvard, and the last resort of graduate students who couldn’t find a better place to live."[8] (The living units were renovated between 1993 and 1995 and the common areas overhauled in 2013.[4])

References

  1. ISBN 9780195335798. Archived
    from the original on 3 January 2015 – via Google Books.
  2. ^ a b c d e "AD Classics: Peabody Terrace". arch daily. Open access icon
  3. ^ Campbell, Robert (Summer 2004). "Why Don't the Rest of Us Like the Buildings the Architects Like?". Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences: 22.
  4. ^ a b "Peabody Terrace". Harvard University Housing. Open access icon
  5. ISBN 1-55849-201-1. Open access icon
  6. ^ "Dean Sert's Buildings". Harvard Crimson. October 8, 1963.
  7. ^ "Harvard's new married student housing". Progressive Architecture. 45: 122–133.
  8. ^ Dixon, John Morris (December 1994). "Yesterday's paradigm, today's problem". Progressive Architecture. 75 (6): 100–7.
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