Harvard Slows Its Growth in a Boston Neighborhood

We don't know if this is going "from eating brie to cheddar," but even Harvard University is finding that the financial crisis has an impact on its expansion plans into the Allston neighborhood:

The university is reviewing its plans for a four-building, $1 billion science center in Allston, which is across the Charles River from the Cambridge campus. It was scheduled to be completed in 2011.

The university plans to finish the complex’s foundation and build to ground level, but plans after that are uncertain.

“As we approach the end of the current construction phase,” the university president, Drew Gilpin Faust, said in a letter to the Harvard community, “we will examine whether economic conditions are enough improved to allow us to continue construction, or whether to reconfigure the building in ways that yield either new cost savings or new space realization, or whether we need to pause construction.”

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.