The Machine as Garden: The New Harvard Campus in Allston, Sustainability, and Its Effects on Design

In the latest issue of Harvard Design Magazine, SCUPer Nathalie Beauvais portrays a vision for Harvard's Allston Campus in an essay titled: The Machine as Garden: The New Harvard Campus in Allston, Sustainability, and Its Effects on Design.

The old cliché that the pursuit of greenness in buildings is inevitably in conflict with the pursuit of aesthetic quality is disappearing fast. Green features are no longer being thought of as “tack-ons,” like solar roof panels, but instead as elements as integral as support beams or doors. One must design using green features and making them as aesthetically rich and appealing as any other aspect of buildings. The goal of sustainability integrates professions because it forces comprehensiveness and interconnection in addressing all elements of the project: infrastructure, architecture, landscape, and place-making. Only sophisticated engineering and technology can mitigate the impact of development. We must begin to think not of Leo Marx's “machine in the garden” but of the machine as the garden. Acknowledging the engineered nature of the built habitat is a necessary step for embracing sustainable design at the campus scale.