Clearing the Air

Words like "stark" and "raw" have been used both to praise and to criticize Le Corbusier's buildings. However, little has been said about one of the most primitive features of the new Visual Arts Center; the tall colored panels between the windows can be opened to provide a degree of natural ventilation in the upper four floors. This innovation would not have surprised the Indian who left a smoke hole in the top of his tepee and generous gaps around the bottom, but subsequent American architecture has largely overcome natural ventilation.

Lamont Library, for instance, is so tightly sealed it might serve as a space station, complete with air locks at the entrances. A controlled atmosphere may assist study, but the attempt at complete regulation has produced a number of unplanned side effects in Lamont. The characteristic odor has become part of the Harvard experience. The entire fifth and sixth levels are afflicted with an audible and tactile rumble, which sets scores of those little panes in the light fixtures rattling. A cold gale often blows out of the vents in Woodberry poetry room. Most distracting, however, is the fifth floor's persistent ethereal squeak.

Reclaimed Boylston Hal still smells lightly of natural wood pancling, leather upholstery, and new rugs, but these scents will eventually be blown out of the building by an elaborate air control system that attacks both from within and without. Separate units dispersed inside give each floor an independent wind and rumble capability. Mounted on the roof are four propellers, which may not be World War II Air Force surplus, yet reproduce the effects of a B-17 warming up in the attic. They impart to the lower floors a pulse beat of a steady thirty-five, which quickens to a dull tremor throughout the upper stories.

The huge orange fans crowning Holyoke Center have now been covered with a box which hangs out over the east wall. Yet anyone who doubts that the fans are still whirring away, should take the elevator to the tenth floor some time. Air whistles and screeches out of wall vents, doors to the conference rooms rattle, and behind one wall strains a weave of bulging, groaning ducts. Since modifications of the air control system are forbidden, the University may decide the floor is useless and let the undergraduates turn it into a students union. Below the tenth floor the noise is not so noticeable--the conditioning system exerts a more insidious influence over the occupants. When a staff physician wanted a glazier to cut an openable window in one of the fixed panes in his fifth floor office, the building superintendent warned the doctor that even such a minor operation would cause thermostatic neurosis throughout the Mt. Auburn Street arm of the system.

Some windows in the new Houses can be opened, but this is one of the few concessions granted the inhabitants. The main entrance to Leverett Towers leads directly past the hissing intake for the House library. Quincy House Library has been gurgling for almost four years, and a boisterous blower adjacent to the small dining room is more than a match for many dinner speakers.

Since this series of offenses seemed destined to continue, news that Le Corbusier had planned natural ventilation for the Carpenter Visual Arts Center was a welcome surprise. The air regulation system of the completed structure, however, is a disappointment. Only in air movement does the new building improve upon other contemporary architecture at Harvard. Noise is comparable to some of the worst cases in the University. Large, rumbling banks of furnaces and fans actually form parts of the walls in two class areas; air whistles out at such speed that some floor vents have been lifted from their fittings; and normal conversations are impossible in parts of the Center.

For many new Harvard buildings more attention has apparently been given to maintaining a volume of air at constant temperature and humidity than to providing people with congenial living and working areas. The design of air regulation systems which are adequate, but do not irritate or incommode, is a lost art. Yet, as late as the construction of Widener Library the essential principles were still known and applied. The result has been consistently fresh and temperate air supplied to the main reading room without noise or annoyance and numerous individually adjustable combinations of temperatures and breezes in the stalls. Primitive as our for bearers were, there was some wisdom in their quaint ways.