The New Pusey Library: Yard Beautification

CONSTRUCTION WORKERS will start blasting a 40-foot-deep hole in the bedrock of the Yard between Lamont and Houghton Libraries this summer to make room for the Nathan M. Pusey Library. When it is finished in 1975, the Pusey Library will be an almost completely underground, three-level addition to Harvard's library system, and the first new building in the Yard since Lamont.

It's not easy to design a building for the Yard, since it is an almost sacred area for anyone even remotely connected with Harvard, and disrupting its austere appearance would be akin to heresy. When Lamont Library was built in 1947, the public was assured that it would solve Harvard's library space problems and would not disrupt the Yard. "With a steel frame and a brick exterior, the new library will outwardly preserve the conservative architecture of the Yard, while the interior will be of modernistic design," the Crimson wrote on June 27, 1947.

But by 1966, Harvard's existing libraries were becoming inadequate again. Officials of the University Library--a catch-all phrase for all of Harvard's libraries--initiated a ten-year planning study on projected growth and book space. They published a thick pamphlet, full of zooming prediction curves for how many books the library was going to add and how much money it needed. The pamphlet's major recommendation was that a two-million volume addition be built to house parts of the Central Collections--that is, the books in Widener, Houghton, and Lamont Libraries.

President Pusey authorized the Library to begin a preliminary study for building a four-story, completely underground new library, with the stipulation that the appearance of the Yard be maintained intact after the library was built.

Douglas Bryant, who was University Librarian at that time, started raising money for the new library. It took him five years, until Commencement of 1971, to raise the full construction costs. Robert R. Walsh, assistant University Librarian for Building Planning, says that the money was hard to raise because of the recession and because ever-increasing building costs forced the library's budget up from $3 million to the final $8 million figure.

BOK ASSUMED the presidency in the summer of 1971, and, together with Library officials, decided to investigate closely all site possibilities for the new library. It was obvious that it had to be in close proximity to Widener, Houghton, and Lamont, since it would be essentially an extention of those libraries' collections. However, its exact location was a matter to be handled with considerable caution, since it would be the first new building in the Yard since Lamont was built 25 years ago.

Bok also decided to consider the possibility of making a small portion of the library above ground, so that it would be a less forbidding place in which to work. Bok and the Corporation then decided upon a name--the Nathan M. Pusey Library--in tribute to the outgoing president.

In September 1971, the University commissioned the Cambridge architectural firm Hugh Stubbins and Associates to do the site study for the library. Stubbins had designed three previous Harvard buildings: the Loeb Drama Center and two Medical School buildings--the Countway Library and the New England Regional Primate Center--as well as several college libraries. He had been among the final candidates for the Science Center design contract.

Stubbins says that his major concern in the site study was "allowing future options for maximum expansions." The University can--if the need arises--double the library's size after it is built through more underground construction. The University also has the option of tearing down the former President's House at 17 Quincy Street and building an above ground wing of the library.

Bok says that although razing the President's House "is something we've considered, it won't come up for a long time--1985 or 1990--and we hope that by that time new technology in the area of miniaturizing archives will have made further expansion of the library unnecessary."

STUBBINS' SITE study apparently satisfied Bok and the Library officials, because they rehired him in the spring of 1972--after interviewing several other firms--to fully design the library.

Bok made it clear to Stubbins that the Pusey Library should disturb the Yard's appearance as little as possible. He was especially concerned with the view of the library from the Widener-Memorial Church quadrangle, since Commencement is held in front of Memorial Church and graduating seniors and alumni might be upset about an ungainly building intruding on their view of the ceremonies.

"They didn't tell me how it should look," Stubbins says, "but they gave us a thorough program and explicit objectives. We never considered an above ground building. We didn't want to change the Yard that much, and there's really no place to put an above ground building unless the President's House is removed. If that's removed, well then that's another ballpark."

Stubbins submitted his final design of the library in February of this year. Bok was scheduled to approve the design on February 20, but decided to delay his approval a week. The reasons for the postponement were not revealed; Bok would only say that he "wanted to look into all the alternatives and serve aesthetic as well as functional needs," and would not specify what details of the design were in dispute.

Clearly, Bok was still not completely sure that the library would blend visually with the Yard. The Pusey Library will be the first new building under his presidency, although he supervised the design of several buildings while he was dean of the Law School. The two most recent buildings at Harvard--Gund Hall and the Science Center--have raised a huge storm of criticism from students and faculty.

Bok's reservations about the library were ironed out successfully by the next week, and he approved the plans. The following week, the Corporation met and gave the plans their approval.

Bok said that no Corporation members had any objections to the library's final design. However, he refused to publicly release photographs of a model of the library, because, he said, he wasn't sure whether the Board of Overseers' approval was required before the model could be released. "I'd like to release the plans now, but I don't want a bunch of angry Overseers who wanted prior viewing of the plans on my hands," Bok said.

The next day, March 5, Bok conferred with Robert Shenton, Secretary to the Overseers and the Corporation, and found that he could legally release the design. However, he decided to "do the nice thing and show the plans to the Overseers before releasing them," and another week passed before the library plans were available to the University community.

THE PUSEY LIBRARY will rise only nine feet above ground level. It will be covered with grass, shrubs and walkways, and a grassy surrounding mound will shield it from view. It will look, if anything, more foliated than the dusty open space between Houghton and Lamont that it will replace.

The library's bottom two levels will be devoted to stack space for books now housed in Widener, Houghton, and Lamont--the University Archives, the Map Collection, the Theater Collection and about 1 million miscellaneous books. "What will be going into the Pusey Library already exists," Robert Walsh says. "There will be no new staff or new books--just more space. We've had to move several things out of Widener in the past for space reasons. Just in the last few years we've taken out the music, art, history of education, landscape architecture and current science collections and housed them with their respective departments."

Walsh says that the Pusey Library will be open only to those who need to use the special collections there. There will be a guard at the library's entrance who will ask people trying to enter what they want to use at the library before letting them in.

The library's top floor will, however, be devoted to study space. It will have carrels for 60 graduate students and 30 faculty, as well as open tables and a few seminar rooms. Stubbins has not yet finalized the library's interior design, but he says that it will have about 30,000 feet of floor space. It will be connected by underground passageways to the three libraries surrounding it.

LIBRARY OFFICIALS seem generally pleased with the library's appearance and book capacity. The surrounding mound outside is considered Stubbins's most ingenious innovation, though, because it will allow the upper floor to be as well lit as the inside of Lamont during the day but at the same time will give people inside the library a substantial degree of privacy and spare them from watching disjointed pairs of legs troop by all day. The mound's inner side will be concrete covered with ivy and small plants.

Everyone concerned with the library agrees that, amid all this sagacious planning and brilliant design, there will be one major problem: construction. The library's site is, unfortunately, on a bed of rock that will have to be blasted out before building can start. There will be a considerable amount of noise next year while construction crews dig the four-foot deep hole in which the library will rest.

Stubbins admits that "the hole in the Yard is going to be a pretty messy thing to put with for a couple of years. People will just have to walk around it. Access to Lamont will, of course, be maintained."

Construction will begin after this year's Commencement, probably around June 15, and end by Spring of 1975. Stubbins says that he thinks the hole will be filled in by the time the class of 1974 graduates.

Bok's concern with beautifying the Yard will not end with the Pusey Library design. He is already working with Buildings and Grounds officials on a new scheme to exclude all vehicles from the roadways in the Yard. Stubbins has already done a preliminary study--officially called the Yard Service System Study--that suggests that quiet electric carts be used for all the functions now performed in the Yard by motor vehicles.

Bok says that the electric cart plan is still in very rough outline, but that it will be "an efficient and certainly more pleasant way of performing the functions of cars and trucks."

"What I really want to do," says Bok, "is give the Yard the aura of a great grassy mall. That would be a really handsome sight."