No Dragons Behind the Moat

If you're new to the Ed School, by now you've seen the unusual brick tower at the end of Appian Way called Larsen Hall and wondered what it's supposed to be. (Even if you're not new, you're still probably wondering.) Since the building first opened in 1965, it's been called everything from a concrete bunker to a genial robot, an IBM card in 3-D to a medieval castle. It's been likened to the Ronchamp Chapel in France and to the Whitney Museum in New York.

It's clear from articles written about the building and comments from those involved in the planning that the Houston-based architects, Caudill, Rowlett, and Scott, weren't necessarily trying to create a type of building — a castle or a card — but were trying to build something interesting while also being attentive to lots of needs: a city council concerned with historic preservation, faculty and programs with varied requirements, and very limited space. In a letter written to Roy Larsen in 1964 after learning that the building would be named for Larsen, the lead architect, William Caudill, wrote, "You might like to know that one of the main design premises of the building was to make it as flexible as a glass Manhattan office building, still have the feeling of permanency that will allow it to 'dwell together in unity' with other Harvard buildings, yet retain its individuality. Now if it does these things — and I think the building will — we must have anticipated that it would be called Roy Larsen Hall. Like the man, the building should be dynamic, should have a timeless quality, and should be a distinctive and distinguished individual. If not, fire the architects — after the dedication."

The architects weren't fired, and the building received many accolades over the years, particularly for some of the unusual features, such as a glass-filled sunken courtyard built with one-way mirrors that allowed researchers to observe fifth- and sixth-graders from Cambridge as they took classes. "New and stimulating," wrote one architect in The Boston Globe. "Active, ingenious," wrote the authors of Harvard: An Architectural History. In 1967, the building won an award from the Texas Society of Architects.

But there was also criticism of the building's quirkiness. Windows were few and far between, in part because the architects wanted to draw the eye to a small number of stunning views. Which they did — at the expense of natural light (very little) and windowless offices (very many). Interestingly, more windows were added on the street side after the Harvard Corporation threatened in 1963 to veto the original design.

Interior space also became an issue. One of the design intentions was to make the space as flexible as possible by placing all of the immovable building parts — ventilation shafts and stairs, for example — along the outer walls, leaving center areas open and allowing inner walls to be moved as needs changed. But, as James Ackerman, then-chair of Harvard's Fine Arts Department, wrote in 1965 in Connections, spaces were eventually subdivided using fixed materials. Part of the problem, he wrote, was the committee approach to building a building. "Without an autocrat," Ackerman wrote, "everyone gets more or less what he wants, and that makes chaos."

It seems that Caudill had a sense of humor about the criticism, saying at the dedication ceremony in 1966, "The new structure may have a strange form, but it will wear a familiar Harvard tweed." And finally, "What's wrong with castles?"