Boylston Hall Gets a Facelift

By Alvin Powell

Contributing Writer

Eight months after academic departments were moved out and construction equipment moved in, Boylston Hall's facelift is nearly complete.

Tables, chairs, and office furniture are in place and -- although workers are still adding the final touches -- professors and departmental administrators are in their offices and at their desks, ready to tackle the new academic year.

Around them is the new Boylston -- lighter, brighter, and more user-friendly than the old version, created in a 1959 renovation. Boylston Hall, just west of Widener Library, was originally built in 1857 as an anatomical museum and a chemistry laboratory.

The $8.3 million renovation, which involved gutting the building except for bearing walls and structural members, is the second phase of a multiyear effort to provide improved office and program space for Harvard's humanities departments. The first part, completed last year, involved renovating the Harvard Union, Burr Hall and Warren House to create the Barker Center, which houses 12 humanities groups.

"Boylston Hall is the second major piece of our project for the humanities at Harvard: to create -- close to Widener -- more attractive and functional spaces for teaching, working, and meeting," said Jeremy R. Knowles, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The project's architects, Robert Olson + Associates of Boston, received praise for opening up and brightening a building remembered as being rather gloomy.

"I am very pleased by the architects' shaping of such light and livable homes for the five departments that are now settling into a splendidly renovated Boylston," Knowles said. "The windows that won't open, the dark and disorienting corridors, the asymmetric auditorium, and the dysfunctional lounge are mercifully no more."

Classics Department Chairman Gregory Nagy, the Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and professor of comparative literature, said not only is the new Boylston brighter than the old one, it is far superior to the cramped quarters at 34 Kirkland St., where the Classics Department resided during the renovation. Now, both junior and senior faculty have offices, as well as access to meeting and conference rooms where larger groups can gather.

"Because of our half-year in exile, we even more appreciate what we have," Nagy said. "[Architect Robert Olson] makes a working atmosphere look luminous and radiant where before it was very dark and poorly lit. I called it a morgue-like atmosphere."

Nagy said the five departments housed in the new Boylston are closely related and compatible. The departments are Literature, Comparative Literature, Classics, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Linguistics.

"We are intellectually much more akin to other departments here," Nagy said. "It's a quantum leap in symbiosis."

Academic Offices in a Historic Building

The main mission during the 1959 renovation was to increase office space, according to architect Robert Olson, principal of Robert Olson + Associates. That objective was achieved by cutting across the original structure's tall windows to add floors. The square-footage increased by 40 percent.

"The building was an academic office building inserted within a historic shell," Olson said. "Our charge was to transform the building to reflect the life of academic departments today. They're all little communities."

This renovation had several goals, according to Capital Projects Manager Elizabeth Randall. Among them were to use the space better and to improve soundproofing and air quality.

A walking tour of the new Boylston starts in the lobby, where the floor is made up of dark blocks of end-grain mesquite. To the left is a clear partition, through which is the renovated lounge. Ahead is the door to the renovated 144-seat auditorium. Inside, the flat seating has been raised to stadium-style, for better sight lines. The front has been rotated 90 degrees, letting workers reopen three large, arched windows that were blocked up in the 1959 renovation.

The first floor also houses three classrooms equipped with modern projection equipment. On the mezzanine level is a small cafeteria, equipped with tables and chairs for those who want to mix work with conversation and coffee.

"Especially in the humanities, so much happens outside the class -- a talk, poetry readings -- that social spaces are so important to this group," Randall said.

The ground floor and the second through fifth floors contain the different departments. Each department had input regarding the design of their office space. Offices and meeting rooms rim the outer walls and are divided from the building's inner section by a corridor. The floors' inner sections contain common space, for reading or meeting, space for faculty and student mailboxes, as well as computer work stations, copy machines and, in some departments, separate rooms for graduate students to meet with their own students.

Glass partitions and indirect light, some of which is directed toward the ceiling, are used to brighten the interior spaces.

On one part of the fourth floor, the ceiling rises past exposed trusses holding up the roof, letting in light from a high side window and creating an overlook from the fifth floor.

A casual observer may not notice one aspect of the renovation that those who worked in Boylston insisted on: operable windows. So, by popular demand, the new windows, which had been sealed, now open. In addition, the renovation included new electrical, mechanical, and plumbing systems.

Though people like the results, the construction process wasn't always smooth, Randall said. The strong economy created a heavy demand for construction materials, but manufacturers cautious -- about an economic slowdown -- did not always hire workers to produce the materials, Randall said. The result was that some items were hard to find.

The front steps, for example, were supposed to be blue stone to match the building's exterior. After weeks became months and the stone still didn't arrive, Randall said the decision was made to go with more easily available granite.

The weather didn't cooperate either. The mesquite floor in the entryway, cut in Texas, was delayed as a result of people working half-days in the early summer because of the long stretch of record heat.

"Fortunately, the people moving in have been so pleased with the results, they don't seem to mind that we're still tying up the loose ends," Randall said.