Unveiled

Progress makes its greatest steps in stocking feet.

Yesterday, without thin horns or tape cutting, the powers-that-be opened the doors of Burr Hall to the University. With luck, that act also opened the eyes of the still doubting, hesitate world to the face that beauty and utility can be most happily wedded through modern design.

Before Burr Hall's designers began, they called in science professors and lecturers, the men who would be teaching in the building, and asked them what they needed. The architects then built their plans around the basic necessities of a science lecture room.

They had only a small, lopsided lot in which to fit two large lecture rooms, plus workshops, conference rooms, offices, and storage space. They got all that in with enough room left over for exhibition halls and a terrace. The rooms are set up for scientific and other demonstrations in the best style of modern, discern as you learn, education.

Yet, even with an up-to-date interior, the firm could have slapped a red brick, colonial exterior on the building and squared it off to match the fire station across the street--a station which was built in colonial style to match other Yard buildings nearby.

Instead, the four men threw off tradition and emerged with a building which proclaims that it was built to keep, not up with, but ahead of the times.

The sharpest criticisms have come from the old guard. To many a while haired alumnus, massive cream colored curved walls floating above nothing but glass is as great a sacrilege as dressing John Harvard in a Zoot Suit. Not only is this monstrosity out of place, but it is plainly ugly, they say.

Then, certainly, is Sever Hall, the most modern building of its time when completed, out of place between Widener and Appleton. Even Memorial Hall, an architectural throwback, is now accepted as part of the University scene, which would seem bare without it. New ideas suffer the risk of being hit until either the attacker or the idea is worn out.

Lamont inserted the wedge, the Graduate Center widened the gap. Now that Burr has crept right in, the University can boast that it still points the way in education by absorption.

A channelled, ordered mind will enter Burr Hall like a virgin stepping out of Tremont street into Scollay Square. Others will look at its exterior like a country boy watching the tattooed man in a carnival. But there are those who will watch it like a mother seeing her youngest take his first steps, in stocking feet.