Architects Judge Best Design For Quincy St. Gate Is No Gate

The instructions told entrants to design a hypothetical gate for the intersection of Mass Ave, and Quincy St. symbolizing the passage between the city of Cambridge and Harvard But the entry submitted by the winners of the competition proposed that no gate be built at all.

The contest, sponsored by the Harvard Architecture Review, a publication of the Graduate School of Design (GSD), culminated Saturday with a judging by a panel of internationally known architects and critics in a public jury held at Gund Hall.

The winners of the $1000 first prize were Gary Black and Dan Stover, students at Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

The only changes of the Quincy St. site proposed by the winners was that Lamont Library, which they deemed an "intrusive and annoying element," be demolished and a narrow, building running parallel to Quincy St. be build in its place.

In a statement submitted with their proposal, Black and Stover wrote that the Gate of 1880, which stands on Mass. Ave behind Lamont, already expresses the idea of unification and boundary, although its impact is reduced by the presence of the Lamont building, and that another gate for Quincy St. would be superfluous and counterproductive.

While most of the other entries to the competition included a design for a gate, the winning entry as well as the second and third place entries did not The winning entries appealed to the judges because they went beyond the parameters of the problem and addressed not only the issue of Harvard's environs but the overall conceptual urban design of Harvard and Cambridge, said Review Editor Charles H. Osborne.