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Tata Hall
At long last, a great building at Harvard Business School
Harvard Business School occupies a majestic bend on the Boston side of the Charles River. McKim Mead and White designed the original Georgian campus in the 1920’s, with landscape design by Frederick Law Olmstead. The twelve buildings organized around courtyards and centered on Baker Library are a fit reflection of Harvard University’s campus directly across the river. It took several decades for HBS to outgrow its core campus.
As it expanded, some of Boston’s best architects created undistinguished work on prime sites. From Shepley Bulfinch’s 1970 McCullum Center to Ben Thompson’s 1976 Soldier’s Field Park, to CBT’s 1999 MacArthur Hall to Machado Silvetti’s 2003 One Western Avenue, Harvard lined the riverfront with buildings that were ordinary in concept and execution, did little to enhance the quality of the campus and nothing to connect to the river. Although One Western Avenue suffered blistering criticism when it opened, I find MacArthur Hall the most offensive of the bunch. There is a limit to how tall a building can be, how applied it’s sloped roofs, and how massive it’s fake chimneys and still be called Georgian. MacArthur exceeds…
