HAA 170G - Luke Calamita

For the aptly-timed grave comparison, I decided to choose two monuments that are distinctly opposite in style. At the Old Burying Ground, Joseph Coollidge's tombstone stands as a relatively inelaborate testament to his earthly tenure, during which he served as Deacon of the First Church of Cambridge. photographed by "the moo" on findagrave.com       Having been carved upon his death in 1737, it is simple, but not barebones (no pun intended), featuring a somewhat detailed depiction of a winged skull, suggesting religious ascent and eternal life, but also evoking the inevitability of death as would a memento mori.  Mary Baker Eddy Monument in the Architectural Review , Volume 42, No. 251, October 1917 The simplicity of Coollidge's grave marker is more marked when considered in light of the elaborate constructions at Mount Auburn, though consideration must be given to the significant gap in time between their conceptions. Pictured above is the Mary Baker Eddy Monument a...

  Detailed in Bainbridge Bunting's authoritative text Harvard: An Architectural History (1985, Harvard University Press), the majority of the land upon which the Radcliffe Quadrangle (henceforth "the Quad") sits today was acquired in 1900 by Radcliffe College from the estate of Willard Phillips (Bunting 140). Shown in pink at the lower right of the above map (G.W. Bromley and Co.'s 1903 Atlas of the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts , Plate 24, "Part of Wards 9 & 10" ), the first dormitory the college built was Bertram Hall in 1901.   Followed in 1907 by its sister building Eliot Hall, both designed by A.W. Longfellow, Jr., the two were envisioned by Bremer W. Pond to be connected by an entrance arcade in his renderings of the unexecuted project above (Bunting 140, 141). This would have provided enclosure of the Quad in the area that today features one of the few gaps in the fortress of facades, still filled only by a parking lot.  Labeled below, from le...

For my final project, I would like to examine Harvard's powers as landlord, steward of student communities, and institutional developer within Cambridge and, more recently, Allston. This has led me to conceive of two possibilities: 1). Re-imagining Harvard Transit: With an expanding campus divided into multiple non-contiguous sections, maintaining accessibility to and from all areas is becoming less and less viable with Harvard's buses. The issue is integral to student quality of life, with shuttles being the lifelines for student populations that are otherwise geographically isolated. As Harvard commits millions to the development of West Station in Allston, how will it link this new transit node to the rest of campus? The physical expansion of a system at its limits in the narrow, car-overloaded central bottleneck that is the Square threatens to overload the understaffed shuttle system, prompting me to inquire whether the school could or should leverage its political and real...