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Prof. George Thrush convinced me to give
Harvard’s 1 River St a second chance, and after doing so, I still
believe it’s an eyesore.Though now I believe it’s an eyesore with
aspirations.

My aesthetic objections to the building are pretty visceral:
it’s aggressively straight-edged, thumbing its nose at trendy organic curves; it seems to reject everything we learned about brutalism;
it is formal, yet the window arrangements follow no discernable
pattern; its postmodern deconstruction of Harvard College’s courtyard fetish also eerily reads like a parable of one tall tower falling into another.
Perhaps you can also read it as an absurdly wide gateway of sorts, as
Prof. Thrush seems to, yet if so it’s a typical Harvard gateway:
outsiders enter only to find themselves surrounded by walls and turned
back out again.

Perhaps most telling are Thrush’s final words on the
topic:

But
even One Western Avenue will age, and
this moment of transition between one image of Harvard University and
the next will too become part of the landscape of our lives. What the
future should look like
is hard to pin down. But if we succumb to the occasional uncomfortable
feeling that comes with seeing buildings that look unfamiliar, we risk
relinquishing our crucial leadership in the American culture of ideas.
One Western
Avenue reminds us of what we deeply know — that the future is
always uncomfortable.

But
if, as
Thrush points out, One Western Ave is an example of
“modern” architecture (maybe “postmodern” would apply as well), are we
not ready to move on to new dreams now that the energy and vitality of
the modernist project seems to have withered away? What “culture of
ideas”does this building represent? Does it lift the soul or inspire?
Or
does it point to a glum new era of bleak pessimism, a building that
looks (and probably is) cheaply constructed to reflect today’s era of uber-economic rationality — designed to “age” as well
as any of its peers from earlier decades, which is to say, poorly.

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