Plans to construct a home for the arts at Harvard began circulating after the 1953 appointment of President Nathan M. Pusey. A committee was formed in 1955 to investigate the question, later releasing a report which secured the university’s decisive commitment. Josep Lluís Sert, Dean of the Graduate School of Design, had previously worked with Le Corbusier, and maintained close ties through his involvement in CIAM. Asked to advise the president on the selection of an architect, Sert encouraged Le Corbusier to consider the project in a 1958 letter, eventually arranging a 1959 visit which solidified his principle involvement. 

The loose brief called for the architect to accommodate flexible workshops and studios, exhibition spaces, a lecture hall, and a dedicated visiting artist's studio, all within an “Inspirational Building” (Gruen). The proposed site for the modern building was not without controversy, situated east of Harvard Yard, abutting the Neo-Georgian Fogg Museum to the north and Harvard Faculty Club at its south. Regardless, the project moved forward without restriction on Le Corbusier’s creative freedom. 

In 1991, the east ramp was extended by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates to connect with their contemporary addition to the adjacent Fogg Museum. This extension included a switchback ramp to the ground level of the Carpenter Center, as well as a staircase continuing north to Prescott St. 

The Gwathmey Siegel addition was demolished in 2010, and replaced by a Renzo Piano design completed in 2014. The Piano building eliminated the switchback ramp, but extended the northward span of the ramp to connect with Broadway, at the end of the block. 

The Center continues to house gallery space, studios, and screening/lecture facilities for the Harvard Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies; although, the expanded department now has facilities in Sever and Hunt halls as well. The analog photo facilities in the basement are now occupied by the Harvard Film Archive.

The building is in fair condition, showing sporadic weather stains and patchwork from previous spalling episodes, but signs of unattended deterioration are negligible. The third level entrance doors are kept locked for security purposes, greatly impairing the rhythms of circulation around which the Center was designed (Sekler 269).

The Carpenter Center’s intricate walls of glass and concrete house the varied activities of Harvard’s arts programming. Le Corbusier’s vision, however, stretched beyond the simple accomodation of department needs, seeking to engage the wider community, and encourage exchange across disciplines. As movement and space throughout the design relate with great intention to the campus footpaths, Corbusier’s “architectural promenade” was refined into a “touristic route” where the currents of pedestrian life are exposed to, and intertwined with, the Center’s artistic mission (Sekler 59). 

The Carpenter Center’s basic massing can be reduced to a handful of discrete forms. At its core, a roughly cubic volume is rotated 25 degrees from the streetline, and situated between two freeform curvilinear wings. One is elevated to adjoin the second story, and swells to the north and west, while the other is raised to the third, reaching south and east. Appended to the central volume’s south corners are two rectilinear shafts which rise to the building’s full five stories. The larger shaft to the east contains a stairwell and bathrooms, while the west supports an elevator and an exposed concrete fire escape. In a dramatic gesture, the center volume is bisected by a pedestrian ramp which rises from the parallel streetside boundaries of the lot. Curving inward to match the diagonal axis of the building, the two legs meet at a third story landing. This plateau was designed as the building’s main entrance, and sits within an exposed cavity where floor to ceiling panes, on either side, make a dramatic showcase of the second and third story studio spaces. 

The projecting wings are raised on pilotis, leaving a sunken void where paved extensions of the sidewalk flow into the recessed lobby of the first floor. A staircase on this level, independent of the service shafts, leads to the sub-level. Sharing the basement with photographic labs and darkrooms is the building’s auditorium, which marks the only internal exception to the building’s regular column grid; as three spanning girders free the space of physical interruption. The double height auditorium extends into the first floor above, but only as an inaccessible void space. The first level of studio space begins on the second floor, with a vast free plan room occupying the whole of the north curvilinear wing. Through a hallway across the ramp chasm is a smaller three bay appendix for the director’s studio, projecting out to the boundary of the south wing above. The third story contains another free plan studio in the south wing and flexible gallery space in the north segment of the center square. This gallery opens onto a planted terrace above the north wing. Only the fourth floor plan occupies the full footprint of the center cube, and features no projecting space beyond those boundaries, aside from the two circulation towers. The greater portion of this floor is a free space used for exhibitions, but two seminar rooms are also enclosed along the south wall. The fifth floor is dedicated entirely to the visiting artist’s studio, and occupies only an approximate sixth of the center square plan it surmounts. A loggia of three exterior columns rises to the east, with beams spanning inward to the studio, while a hallway to the south connects to the main service shaft. 

Varying treatments across the building’s envelope break the key masses into a secondary scale of depth and detail. Glazing is recessed into deep angled grids of concrete brise soleil across the south wing, the east face of the fifth floor studio, the second, third, and fourth, floors of the center cube’s east elevation, and the fifth floor of its west. The north wing features a sequence of narrow concrete mullions, spaced with rhythmic irregularity as a gesture of plastic expression. This is a Corbusian device called an ondulatorie, and beyond its east terminus are three narrow clerestories. Floor to ceiling panes without brise soleil are featured on the first story east face, third story north face, and third story west face of the center cube. They also appear on the south and west faces of the fifth floor studio, and line the second and third floor walls of the ramp cavity. Featured between all three of these treatments are operable ventilation fins called aérateurs, which stretch from floor to ceiling, and are painted either red, yellow, green, gray, or white. Unique to the west service shaft is the use of translucent glass block, lining the stairwell with a concrete spandrel interruption at each floor slab.

The Carpenter Center was constructed using poured concrete of a more deliberately refined character than was typical of Le Corbusier’s postwar work (Curtis 220). Board markings are visible on the curved walls, but the bands are narrow and precise. Flat surfaces are smooth apart from form tie holes and horizontal incised bands, which mark the division between walls and floor slabs. Drain spouts for the terraces are positioned within such bands. The columns were poured using sonotubes, and connect to the floor slabs without any form of base or capital. Corbusier specified that spiral sonotube markings were to be avoided in favor of smooth columns, which was largely achieved with some exceptions (Curtis 220). 

The grid of pilotis for the core square of the plan measures seven by four columns. The grid reaches an additional three columns further south and two east at the furthest extents of the third story wing; but only one further north for the second story wing, whose western projection is supported by a wall following its contour rather than any additional columns. A total of three columns are eliminated in the auditorium space by the plate welded beams spanning the room. The beams are sheathed in white plastered drywall. 

Only the basement and first floor are equipped with central air conditioning. The upper stories are served by local climate units, sheltered in soundproof cupboards, and connected to distribution channels in the floor slabs (Sekler 32).

The Carpenter Center occupies an irregular site, owing to the southward projection of the Fogg Museum to the west, and northward projection of the Harvard Faculty Club to the east. The building’s dynamic siting and swelling curvilinear forms respond to the challenge of these skewed boundaries. The east and west borders are more straightforward, placing the building between the narrow Quincy and Prescott Streets, whose sidewalks are connected by Carpenter’s main pedestrian ramp. Across Quincy street is Harvard Yard, whose patterns of foot traffic at the center of campus helped inspire the particularly formative concern for circulation in the project (Curtis 217).

The Carpenter Center’s neighbors were all revivalist buildings, mostly Neo-Georgian, at the time of its design. This remains largely the case today, with the major exception of Renzo Piano’s 2014 addition to the Fogg Museum, sited directly to the north.

In private writings, Le Corbusier avowed his intent to make the Carpenter Center a summative showpiece for the theories and forms which defined his vision and career. (Curtis 220, 221; Sekler 20, 230). A number of factors seem to have influenced this commitment, including his appreciation for the arts-educational program of the building, preoccupation with his legacy at an advancing age, and the status of the Center as his sole American testament (Curtis 221; Sekler 2, 222, 258). In its uniquely self-conscious exhibition of his ideas, the building holds great technical significance, and an enigmatic place within the architect’s immeasurably influential oeuvre.

Following the war, Le Corbusier’s emphatic machine-age rhetoric was tempered by a humanistic, if not sentimental, appeal to archaism (Frampton 214). The Carpenter Center seems to suggest a bold reassertion of the radical spirit from his formative years, evident in more ways than the smooth finish of its prismatic surfaces (Sekler 256). The crisp treatment and defining presence of the exposed slab and pier system, recalls his early Dom-ino model of construction more directly than most other postwar projects (Curtis 216, 221). The building’s free treatment of spatial elements, within its regular structure, also bears a more distinct adherence to his seminal Five Points than some of the weightier and more monumental projects of his final decades (Curtis 218; Sekler 250). A dramatic spectacle is made of the architect’s fixations with movement and scale, as the sweeping gesture of the ramp passes an urban thread through the heart of the building. In his earliest concept for the Center, the ramp was to follow a spiral path to an exhibition room at its summit, putting into practice a spatial sequence which had endured in his imagination since the 1929 Mundaneum, and through successive iterations of the Museum of Unlimited Growth since 1939 (Curtis 218; Frampton 85, 144). 

The building’s treatment of sun control and passive ventilation has been critiqued as a formal quotation of his Mediterranean vocabulary, unfit for the cold New England climate (Seckler 268). Over a decade earlier, he had similarly advocated for the use of brise soleil over a hermetically sealed and mechanically conditioned envelope for the United Nations in New York (Žaknić 25). Whatever his reasoning may have been in either situation, with a partial explanation offered in the need for diffused light at the Carpenter Center, the depth and complexity of the envelope makes the building unmistakably Corbusian in character. The Carpenter Center does not feature any Modulor iconography, but celebrates the system of scale in its rhythmic striations on the ramp and other floor surfaces, as well as the distinctive ondulatoires.

Whether the profusion of conceptual and formal devices demonstrated at the Carpenter Center amounts to an effective synthesis, or a sentimental collection, the building achieves an astounding summation of Le Corbusier’s theory and practice, all within a concise and functional ensemble of volume, surface, and plan.

Enthusiasm for the importance and evolving societal role of the arts spread with great fervor on American college campuses in the 1950s (Sekler 5). Harvard’s long history of artistic instruction shares a common lineage with Le Corbusier's Arts & Crafts background. Foundational to both was Ruskin’s humanistic mission for the arts, enriching life through the synthesis of academic and practical disciplines (Sekler 4). In his commission for the Carpenter Center, Le Corbusier saw the opportunity to enshrine his own approach to “harmonizing the head and hand,” creating a didactic “synthesis of the major arts” to house the department (Curtis 217; Sekler 258). 

Subsequent currents of style and taste are evident in the Cambridge landscape, but the high aspirations of the Carpenter Center endure, attesting to a renaissance of belief in the social role and progressive capacity of the arts.

The prevailing American attitude towards interwar European modernism, in the earliest chapters US familiarity, framed the overseas developments in largely stylistic terms (Panigyrakis 71). When radical modern voices began arriving as expatriots and refugees, many securing positions at leading US institutions, a deeper understanding of the rhetoric beneath their forms entered American discourse (Panigyrakis 55). Walter Gropius’ tenure at the Harvard GSD sent shockwaves throughout the nation’s architectural education, but more locally, it shaped Harvard’s progressive image lasting well into the postwar decades. True to this identity, Harvard administrators sought a leading architectural mind when planning the Carpenter Center, and responded with enthusiasm to Sert’s courting of Le Corbusier for the position (Sekler Viii). 

Harvard’s storied campus features an eclectic variety of revivalist work from a number of the US’ most eminent 19th century’s architects (Curtis 217). Situated close to the Center of campus, some critical concern was voiced regarding the Center’s stylistic departure from its neighbors, but little in the way of dissent amounted to meaningful resistance. In fact, some writers critical of the building’s siting expressed their dismay with concessions of admiration. Ada Louise Huxtable’s 1963 review in the New York Times read, “This [building] violates the street and scandalizes the neighborhood. At the same time [it] manages to make everything around it look stolid and stale. It does this not because it is brash or novel, but because it is so incredibly rich in bold ideas” (Huxtable). In a 1962 report on the rising building, journalist John Morris Dixon commented in Progressive Architecture, “The building is totally unrelated to the vocabulary of forms and details of the surrounding buildings, yet the relationship of forms and newly created spaces between them is peculiarly satisfying…  it seems to complement the surrounding red brick masses, rather than competing with them for the limited space” (Dixon). Even Vincent Scully, amid polemic attacks on modernism in his 1969 book American Architecture and Urbanism, commented that the Carpenter Center is, “respectful urbanism, and excellent for the street” (Scully 231).

Harvard would continue to build in the spirit of the times following its venture with the Carpenter Center. James Stirling’s Post-Modern Sackler museum, for instance, is just a block away, and Renzo Piano’s contemporary Fogg Addition sits next door. The treasured ensemble of Harvard Yard, however, remains untouched; with evolving sensitivities to context and preservation made evident in Hugh Stubbins 1973 Pusey Library, sunken underground to shelter the yard’s historical image.

The scope and ubiquity of Le Corbusier’s global influence is difficult to convey. In the US, he was an inspirational figure to generations of American architects, but his personal relationship with the country was more complex. From his earliest visit to the States in 1935, his impression fluctuated between striking awe and bitter disappointment (Frampton 111-112). The might of American cities and their industry seemed to validate the scale and potential of his urban visions. At the same time he was sickened by displays of congestion and decay, loathing the spirits of greed and decadence he saw at fault (Frampton 112-113). His troubled affair with the UN committee after the war compounded feelings of distrust and disdain for American culture, claiming his design for the New York building had been abused, and his credit erased, by “American gangsters” (Žaknić 26-31; Curtis 217). If not for his friendship with Josep Lluís Sert, it is doubtful he would have taken a US commission in his late life; yet through their collaboration, he found the opportunity to leave a final proud statement in the country which both enlivened and evaded his architectural dreams (Žaknić 29, 31).

On a local scale, the Center was a landmark contribution to New England’s growing collection of world-class innovative architecture. Reaffirming the call sounded by Gropius and Breuer’s seminal American work, the building invigorated practice in the Boston Metropolitan area, joined soon after by masterworks from I.M. Pei, Paul Rudolph, Benjamin Thompson and a rich assortment of local firms.

Rivaled by the likes of Palladio and Wright in the impact of his oeuvre and writings, Le Corbusier’s built work offers rich insight into the arts, culture, urbanism, and technology of 20th century modernism. His rhetoric and work always moved hand in hand, but the profoundly sentimental statement he produced at the Carpenter Center is exceptional among his projects. As much a place of education in spirit as it is in program, the lessons and visions of Le Corbusier’s towering persona saturate the building from the streetline to its intimate details.

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