The Hand & the Head

To an architect who had built an entire city in India, the site of the proposed building at Harvard University must have looked no bigger than a 50-franc note. The new Visual Arts Center that Harvard wanted France's irascible Le Corbusier to build was to stand between the neo-Georgian Faculty Club on busy Quincy Street and the more heavy-handed neo-Georgian Fogg Art Museum only yards away. How could the master of "brutal"' architecture put up anything that would not look like a brash intruder? Last week the center was in full operation, and Harvard was pretty much agreed that though it might be difficult to live in, it was a great dramatic success.

Like all of Le Corbusier's later masterpieces, the building is as free as sculpture. From every angle it offers fresh surprises, and sometimes it seems, with all its pillars and recesses and terraces, as intricate as the waterworks that young Le Corbusier used to work on when he was a watchmaker's apprentice back in Switzerland. It rests on pilotis that vary in size according to the weight they must bear. Each of the five floors seems different from the others, for the building is an enormously imaginative assortment of squares and rectangles broken by great sweeping curves. A ramp snakes up from Quincy Street through the third floor and spills out on to Prescott Street. Three floors have outdoor terraces, and each studio has a wall of glass.

Bare Skeleton. The building has the blunt honesty which decrees that, inside and out. the skeleton must be left bare. The surface of the reinforced concrete is intentionally left unfinished for texture, though it is not as rough and pitted as the fac,ades of the buildings in the Indian provincial capital that Le Corbusier built at Chandigarh. Interior pipes are not only exposed but accented in green paint, like streaks of emerald against the white walls. Even the heating machinery stands exposed throughout the building, often recalling the boiler room of a ship.

All this is part of Le Corbusier's belief that no fancy surfacing, decorative covering, or even the sense of precision imposed by modern machinery, has been allowed to hide the fact that architecture through the ages is as much the work of the hand as of the head. As Le Corbusier said in his own royal way: "Le Corbusier has kept the instinct of the prophetic, indispensable, practical and beneficent relations between the hand and the head."

Sunny Cambridge? A lot of the building's users find this lofty approach to be divorced from practical needs. It is all very well, critics say, to want to achieve a perfect "interpenetration of outdoor and indoor space"; but even Le Corbusier could not get around the fact that for those on the inside, the "outdoor spaces" are going to seem rather full of the center's Georgian red brick neighbors. As for Le Corbusier's famous concrete sunbreakers, one professor thinks that they show "a fantastically optimistic opinion of the amount of sunlight there is in Cambridge." And finally, since the asymmetrical building is wrapped around symmetrically spaced pilotis, the structural columns are apt to rise any old place in any given room. But if Harvard has its doubts as to whether the center will ever work smoothly, it does not doubt that this modest-sized building has become the most commanding structure in Cambridge.

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