Week 5

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 estate assets to create better transit via route redesign, modal shift, or other interventions.

 

Current fixed-angle "Vignelli-style" Harvard Transit map as featured on all stops. Photo by me

2. Removing the River: This option for a final paper can be seen as an examination of an answer to the questions regarding the expansion of Harvard that I just posed. In 2001, the university hired Rem Koolhaas and his firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), to develop a master plan for the growing campus. The most striking feature of the resulting document is the "Moses Scheme," which sought to divert the Charles River to an artificial channel further south, resulting in the union of Harvard's land holdings on both sides of the current riverbed by filling in the dividing stream. Referring to "the absence of historical precedent on [Allston's] side of the Charles," the plan recommends that Harvard begin to plan more centrally and cohesively instead of on the ad-hoc basis on which it currently operates. This paper would seek to analyze the implications of moving the Charles in context of the two cities Harvard occupies, who would benefit, and the responsibilities to the students and locals between which the university must navigate. Questions of Harvard's reluctance to wield its full institutional power for the sake of expansion (and why expansion may not be desirable for those in control) would also be addressed. 

 

 

Proposals for Charles River Diversion/"Moses Scheme," Rem Koolhaas/OMA 

https://www.oma.com/projects/harvard