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One Western Avenue occupies an important site at the southeast corner of the Harvard Business School campus, adjacent to the Charles River, where Western Avenue crosses Soldiers Field Road. As such, the site marks the arrival to Harvard’s campus from downtown Boston and areas south.
The building’s configuration and image are based on our interpretations of its physical context along the river: the early-twentieth-century, five-story, brick-clad, U-shaped neo-Georgian courtyard houses and the mid-twentieth-century, twenty-story, concrete paneled modern towers. Both types are characteristic of the university’s riverfront and both have been excellently designed by the best architects of their times.
The five-story low-rise courtyard building is placed along Western Avenue to establish a pedestrian scale. The fifteen-story mid-rise on the riverfront forms--in a pairing with the taller buildings across the river--a virtual "entrance" to Harvard when arriving from downtown Boston and the Massachusetts Turnpike. In addition, to use in Allston the same building types that have been used in Cambridge speaks of our desire to make both sides of the river--and all thereby implied--equal.
While One Western Avenue combines the two emblematic types of courtyard and mid-rise buildings, it adds something else to them: a three-story, bridge-like building raised four levels above the ground and spanning 180 feet. This bridge is very important and performs several tasks: First, it clearly divides the building’s main open area into two very different spaces, a courtyard and a front lawn; from the courtyard looking out, the river view appears framed, as if it were seen through a gigantic window, enhancing the experience of seeing the water.
Second, it creates a covered terrace between courtyard and front lawn, a tall campus "room" (to which the main entrance from Western Avenue directly leads), suitably "furnished" with a wooden platform intended for everyday as well as special occasions, and for individual as well as group activities; a space like no other on campus indeed.
Third, from a pragmatic point of view, it allows the production of two desirable outcomes that normally exclude one another: a courtyard open to the river, as it should be, and on the top of its edge, three stories of apartments occupying the same "front row" situation. Fourth, from a formal architectural point of view, the newness of the bridge squarely places the building in the domain of the twenty-first century, thus doing what Harvard has always done--as in the buildings of Bulfinch, Richardson, Gropius, Le Corbusier or Sert, all of which represent the newest ideas of their times.
Consistent with the choice of building types is the selection of skin materials: brick for the courtyard building and cast stone for the mid-rise and the bridge. But in order to produce visual variety, scale down the building masses and, indirectly, relate to the material articulation shown by both neo-Georgian and modern buildings present in the surrounding physical context, we have established a series of rules for the façades that allows the production of experiential richness and visual variety without resort to easy "Picturesquism" or casual decoration.
The courtyard building is wrapped in two brick patterns, one for the exterior walls and the other for the interior walls. These overlap in the entry passageway, thus producing a third pattern. The mid-rise and the bridge are clad in the same material, but used differently from one another, as are the types of windows they display (the novelty of the bridge finds its equivalent in the monolithic treatment of its volume.)
The architectural approach carries with it the notion of virtual "transparency" (one which has been of great importance to both classical and modern architecture) as a way of producing a lucid, architectonic surface treatment. This has been accomplished by letting the ideal prismatic geometry of the various building masses register in the façade planes: when two prisms intersect, their patterns overlap, as if they were transparent, thus producing a new condition that recovers the ideal edges of both prisms. Equally important to this design is the flatness of these masses (which are, in turn, of two kinds: the mass closest to the parking structure is regular and orthogonal, while the others are irregular, their geometry registering the alignment of Soldiers Field Road and the river).
Designing along these lines has allowed us to produce a building that is, we believe, very much a Harvard building, and one of its time and place.
[One Western Avenue] is a formidable and wonderful design, bold, bravely and powerfully conceived, gracefully sited, a respectful but confident rejoinder to Sert’s landmark towers of the sixties and the famous Coolidge courts of the riverfront ranges along the opposite Cambridge bank.
Douglass Shand-Tucci
Architectural Historian
Built in Boston