Harvard library is back in business
Baker renovation offers lessons from past and present
You can't talk about Baker Library at Harvard, as just redone by architect Robert Stern, without talking architectural politics.
In architecture, the two political parties aren't reds or blues. They're futurists and traditionalists. One group wants everything to look historic and time-honored. The other thinks everything should be ''of our own time," ''cutting edge" -- that is to say, newfangled (is oldfangled a word?).
Forget Baker for a moment, and look instead at the University of Virginia. UVA recently announced a new building, designed in the beloved style of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson created the original campus, an acknowledged masterpiece. Think red brick, pale trim, triangular pediments, Greek columns, a white dome, stuff like that.
As soon as they got the news, no fewer than 34 faculty members, most of them from the school of architecture plus a few others, signed an ''Open Letter to the Board of Visitors, the University Administration, and the University Community."
In it they asked, ''Is UVA to become a theme park of nostalgia at the service of the University's branding?"
When they say ''branding," the writers are alleging that UVA is selling itself like cereal, with a brand image -- Jeffersonian architecture -- as a kind of corporate logo.
''What can we do?" asked a member of the Board of Visitors. ''The students and alumni hate all the buildings the architecture professors like, and the architecture professors hate all the buildings the students and alumni like."
No surprise there. For better or worse, architecture schools are often at odds with the values of the larger culture.
I think the architects' letter is silly. It ignores the fact that Jefferson had done plenty of branding. He clothed his buildings with a borrowed dignity, by imitating the architecture of ancient Greece and Rome and that of the Italian Renaissance. He did that, to be sure, with verve and inventiveness.
OK, back to Baker Library. Stern is also dean of the Yale School of Architecture, and he's a significant architectural historian as well. Baker is the most important building at Harvard Business School. It was designed in 1927 by the famous firm of McKim, Mead & White.
Like the rest of the school, Baker is an exercise in the style called Georgian Revival, imitating British architecture of the era of the four kings named George in the 18th century. Georgian looks a lot like Jeffersonian.
McKim, Mead & White made a powerful but one-sided building. The north facade looks across the Charles toward the rest of Harvard. Here stands a huge portico (the fancy word for ''porch") with a row of six enormous columns. It's ''bombastic," says Stern.
Baker's backside, however, as designed by the McKim firm, was very different. Facing only a tangle of highways and train yards, it was a dull box of brown stucco. But today's Harvard wants to expand in this direction into the Allston neighborhood. Baker now needed a handsome face in this direction, too. The school told Stern it wanted Georgian. So Stern, who loves traditional architecture, chopped off almost the whole rear half of Baker and rebuilt it in Georgian. It opened this fall.
From outside, the new half of Baker looks terrific. It's anything but bombastic. Stern does something you see on some older Harvard buildings, such as Lehman Hall. He builds a brick box and then, instead of wasting money on fancy columns and pediments, he more or less draws a picture of a Georgian facade in white trim on the surface of the building. It could almost be painted. Baker is clearly, on this side, not pretending to be a palace. It's a stage set for the theater of student life, a set that instantly evokes the brand image -- the words are inevitable -- of Harvard.
Baker's interior, though, is a disappointment. It's nice that you can walk right through it, either north-south or east-west. But the ground floor rooms exude an odor of death. One huge room, the major entry lobby, is a tomb of historic business documents in sealed glass cases. On the walls are portraits of the school's past deans. It couldn't be more funereal. Stern's new lounge is cheerier, but it lacks informality and intimacy.
Stern's major move is a stair hall that rises through all four floors of the building. ''I wanted to get people to go up a vertical space and not just hit an elevator button," the architect says. But Stern's own word, bombastic, fits perfectly. This is an enormous vacuum carved out of the middle of the building. It's right where there should be a social and meeting center, something that's badly missed on the floors of faculty offices. And the stair is the grand kind that splits into symmetrical wings. There are so many metal railings with vertical bars that the space starts to feel like a prison. An elegant skylight of octagonal openings is nice, but not enough.
When you go up against a master firm like McKim, Mead & White, you'd better have the talent, and also the budget, to compete. Stern's stairs lead to Baker's most important space, the fantastic Stamps Reading Room, part of the original building. More than 500 feet long, it's easily one of the two or three greatest public rooms in the Boston area. It's been beautifully restored by Stern and his collaborating architects, the Boston firm of Finegold Alexander. The detailing is exquisite. Unfortunately, the Reading Room makes Stern's stair hall look like cut-rate grandiosity.
It should be noted that some of the smaller spaces, especially a restored ground-floor faculty lounge, are very good.
Will Harvard's architecture faculty, like UVA's, protest this act of Georgian branding? It won't happen. Harvard is a more eclectic place, more accepting of difference. Nevertheless, the two opposing taste cultures exist here as they do elsewhere.
I have no problem with Baker's style. I lived for three years in Lowell House, a Harvard dorm that is a totally inauthentic imitation of the architecture of Georgian times. I have never been able to persuade myself that life would have been better if the modernist Walter Gropius had come to Harvard 10 years earlier than he did, and designed Lowell House to look like his Bauhaus school in Germany.
I do find it incongruous to see today's Harvard Business School students striding through the dignified Colonial halls with their casual backpacks and jeans. If Baker is a theater of student life, maybe it needs a costume department.
Robert Campbell is the Globe's architecture critic. He can be reached at camglobe@aol.com. 