copyright 2006 Architecture Boston magazine, Boston Society of Architects
The demographics of Harvard graduate students have really changed. There was a time when they made the Cambridge exodus with families in tow, filling Peabody Terrace’s hallways and playgrounds with toddlers’ footsteps in ten regional dialects. The current graduate student is most likely foreign, straight out of school, unfettered, studious, and lacking any furniture. This explains why there are fewer U-Haul trucks chipping away at the bridges on Memorial Drive each fall. It also explains the need for a brave, new graduate student-housing model.
Jonathan Levi, an Adjunct Associate Professor in Architecture at the GSD, has just completed such a model, located off the Cambridge Common on Concord Avenue, in Cambridge, for Harvard University. The Graduate Housing Complex is a gut-renovation of an early 20th century hotel that transforms the site and building into an experimental typology. Levi presented his project at the eighth “Conversations on Architecture”, an informal round-table review of an architect’s work, hosted by Brian Healy.
In presenting his work, Levi concentrated on his rigorous exploration of the plan, which had produced twenty unique unit ideas from duplex, to suite, to single apartments and studios. Working closely with the university, he had distilled these into four configurations: studio, paired studio, two-bedroom, and three-bedroom faculty units. Levi believes that the more highly programmed the spaces, the more likely that they will be used. The paired studio is his most compelling invention, which in plan looks like twins conjoined at the dining nook. Throughout, built-in cabinet/bookcase/desk modules separate space, provide sound buffers, and tell you exactly where your bed will go. The dining nook is a long, narrow room with mirrored banquettes, and a table. None of this can be rearranged, but you have the freedom to rotate your futon in the privacy of your own bedroom, if you’re feeling frisky.
Levi’s boldest move was to develop the quarter-acre one-story garage roof behind the building into a green roof, and landscape the hell out of it. In a gentle nod to domesticity, he introduced a “stoop” vocabulary, so that each faculty unit has its own backdoor that opens onto this substantial, yet unexpected, courtyard. He then cut a three-story glazed passage through the short axis of the building that serves as a “luminous beacon” to draw people up and into the complex from the street.
Several architects at Levi’s Conversation observed the spaces seemed designed for a business traveler rather than a student. The units are so highly controlled that the interior has more in common with a suite hotel than a dormitory. Levi’s response was that graduate students are a “population in transition”: here to study, not to decorate; they would be happy to be relieved of that responsibility. If this is true, he has provided lovely, thoughtful spaces for his monkish protagonists.
