New Grad Center with Functional Planning Will Replace Vets' Housing at Jarvis Court

Steam shovels moved into Jarvis Field this summer to start excavations for the University's new $3,000,000 Graduate Center. Wrecking crows are already well along with the job of tearing down the Portland huts, temporary units which housed six veterans and their families.

Formerly given over to tennis courts, and, from 1874 to 1893 the home of Harvard's first football teams, Jarvis Field broke out in a rash of temporary housing in 1946.

The University obtained the prefabricated units from the Federal Public Housing authority early that year and during the spring they were moved from their wartime locations to Cambridge and reassembled here at government expense.

Dormitories and a Commons Hall

The new Graduate Center, designed by the Architects Collaborative, will include seven dormitories housing 600 unmarried students and a Commons Hall with recreation rooms, meeting rooms, a lounge, and a cafeteria seating 620 at a time.

The Harvard Corporation will supply the $1,000,000 needed to build the Commons Hall from general University funds, while the money for the dormitories is being raised by a drive among the alumni of the Law School and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The project is to be completed in September, 1950.

Under the leadership of Walter Gropius, professor of Architecture and internationally known leader in the development of modern architecture, the architects have concentrated on designing buildings which will give the greatest comfort and utility for the money spent.

The key to this achievement is simplicity and functional design. In three instances, for example, a stair well is made to do double duty by using it to connect two buildings, each using the same set of stairs. This not only cuts building costs, but also helps to unify the group.

Designing the student's room has been a key problem for the architects. After consulting student committees, they evolved a basic unit for the single room. A two-man suite consists of two single rooms next to each other, with or with-out a partition in the middle.

Modern Architecture at Harvard

There are also several three room suites consisting of three of the units with connecting doors, allowing the suite to be arranged for three bedroom-studies or two bedrooms and a central living room.

This functional design is a far cry from the "reactionary" Georgian which typified Harvard's pre-war building. In those days practical considerations were frequently neglected.

Architecture, Not Whim

Legend has it the President Lowell determined the pattern of windows that he wanted in Lowell House, and then left the architects to fit the rooms in behind as best they could. If a bathroom. came behind a main window, or if a man could not stand up in more than half of his top floor room, it was considered unfortunate but unavoidable.

But the most important significance in the design of the new Graduate Center is that it appears to mark Harvard's final acceptance of a new type architecture which has grown up in response to the needs of contemporary society and the potentialities of modern engineering.

After two post-war modern buildings by the University's traditional architects, Coolidge, Sheply, Bulfinch, and Abbot Harvard has turned to Groplus, and in a more general sense, to its own School of Design.

For Gropius and others in the Architects Collaborative teach part-time in that graduate school, and the school it-self, under the leadership of Dean Joseph Hudnut and with several well-known architects on its faculty, has become a leading force in developing and spreading this new architecture, a prime example of which it the rising Graduate Center