51福利

Plans to construct a home for the arts at Harvard began circulating after the 1953 appointment of President Nathan M. Pusey. A committee was formed in 1955 to investigate the question, later releasing a report which secured the university’s decisive commitment. Josep Lluís Sert, Dean of the Graduate School of Design, had previously worked with Le Corbusier, and maintained close ties through his involvement in CIAM. Asked to advise the president on the selection of an architect, Sert encouraged Le Corbusier to consider the project in a 1958 letter, eventually arranging a 1959 visit which solidified his principle involvement. 

The loose brief called for the architect to accommodate flexible workshops and studios, exhibition spaces, a lecture hall, and a dedicated visiting artist's studio, all within an “Inspirational Building” (Gruen). The proposed site for the modern building was not without controversy, situated east of Harvard Yard, abutting the Neo-Georgian Fogg Museum to the north and Harvard Faculty Club at its south. Regardless, the project moved forward without restriction on Le Corbusier’s creative freedom. 

In 1991, the east ramp was extended by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates to connect with their contemporary addition to the adjacent Fogg Museum. This extension included a switchback ramp to the ground level of the Carpenter Center, as well as a staircase continuing north to Prescott St. 

The Gwathmey Siegel addition was demolished in 2010, and replaced by a Renzo Piano design completed in 2014. The Piano building eliminated the switchback ramp, but extended the northward span of the ramp to connect with Broadway, at the end of the block. 

The Center continues to house gallery space, studios, and screening/lecture facilities for the Harvard Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies; although, the expanded department now has facilities in Sever and Hunt halls as well. The analog photo facilities in the basement are now occupied by the Harvard Film Archive.

The building is in fair condition, showing sporadic weather stains and patchwork from previous spalling episodes, but signs of unattended deterioration are negligible. The third level entrance doors are kept locked for security purposes, greatly impairing the rhythms of circulation around which the Center was designed (Sekler 269).

The Carpenter Center’s intricate walls of glass and concrete house the varied activities of Harvard’s arts programming. Le Corbusier’s vision, however, stretched beyond the simple accomodation of department needs, seeking to engage the wider community, and encourage exchange across disciplines. As movement and space throughout the design relate with great intention to the campus footpaths, Corbusier’s “architectural promenade” was refined into a “touristic route” where the currents of pedestrian life are exposed to, and intertwined with, the Center’s artistic mission (Sekler 59). 

The Carpenter Center’s basic massing can be reduced to a handful of discrete forms. At its core, a roughly cubic volume is rotated 25 degrees from the streetline, and situated between two freeform curvilinear wings. One is elevated to adjoin the second story, and swells to the north and west, while the other is raised to the third, reaching south and east. Appended to the central volume’s south corners are two rectilinear shafts which rise to the building’s full five stories. The larger shaft to the east contains a stairwell and bathrooms, while the west supports an elevator and an exposed concrete fire escape. In a dramatic gesture, the center volume is bisected by a pedestrian ramp which rises from the parallel streetside boundaries of the lot. Curving inward to match the diagonal axis of the building, the two legs meet at a third story landing. This plateau was designed as the building’s main entrance, and sits within an exposed cavity where floor to ceiling panes, on either side, make a dramatic showcase of the second and third story studio spaces. 

The projecting wings are raised on pilotis, leaving a sunken void where paved extensions of the sidewalk flow into the recessed lobby of the first floor. A staircase on this level, independent of the service shafts, leads to the sub-level. Sharing the basement with photographic labs and darkrooms is the building’s auditorium, which marks the only internal exception to the building’s regular column grid; as three spanning girders free the space of physical interruption. The double height auditorium extends into the first floor above, but only as an inaccessible void space. The first level of studio space begins on the second floor, with a vast free plan room occupying the whole of the north curvilinear wing. Through a hallway across the ramp chasm is a smaller three bay appendix for the director’s studio, projecting out to the boundary of the south wing above. The third story contains another free plan studio in the south wing and flexible gallery space in the north segment of the center square. This gallery opens onto a planted terrace above the north wing. Only the fourth floor plan occupies the full footprint of the center cube, and features no projecting space beyond those boundaries, aside from the two circulation towers. The greater portion of this floor is a free space used for exhibitions, but two seminar rooms are also enclosed along the south wall. The fifth floor is dedicated entirely to the visiting artist’s studio, and occupies only an approximate sixth of the center square plan it surmounts. A loggia of three exterior columns rises to the east, with beams spanning inward to the studio, while a hallway to the south connects to the main service shaft. 

Varying treatments across the building’s envelope break the key masses into a secondary scale of depth and detail. Glazing is recessed into deep angled grids of concrete brise soleil across the south wing, the east face of the fifth floor studio, the second, third, and fourth, floors of the center cube’s east elevation, and the fifth floor of its west. The north wing features a sequence of narrow concrete mullions, spaced with rhythmic irregularity as a gesture of plastic expression. This is a Corbusian device called an ondulatorie, and beyond its east terminus are three narrow clerestories. Floor to ceiling panes without brise soleil are featured on the first story east face, third story north face, and third story west face of the center cube. They also appear on the south and west faces of the fifth floor studio, and line the second and third floor walls of the ramp cavity. Featured between all three of these treatments are operable ventilation fins called aérateurs, which stretch from floor to ceiling, and are painted either red, yellow, green, gray, or white. Unique to the west service shaft is the use of translucent glass block, lining the stairwell with a concrete spandrel interruption at each floor slab.

The Carpenter Center was constructed usi