Word: archings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...violet sunset, they hoist the bus onto its back. The horde swarms over its body, urinating from on top. A '72 Dodge Challenger, stuck in the mud, is sucked up by the crowd. Before the driver can climb out the windows are bashed in. Out of the crowd arch Molotov cocktails, their path flickered across 8,000 forms, the fire mirrored on their foreheads. Lurching into the warm at top speed comes a bog car to the tune of I'm the King of Rock and Roll. It runs head on into the bus. The night sky is consumed...
...deep-set Syrian arch on the Widener side and the fortress doors that open wider than any other Harvard entrances can't prepare us for the horrors of dilapidation that wait inside. The clattering pipes, the papering done over in a demon green, the creaking stairs. The deceptiveness of time an place: no clocks, uneasy room-numberings that make us jump from floor to floor. Use of the word "egress." When H.H. Richardson designed the building in 1878 he and his associates paid careful attention to the details of the inside; and the outside, as well, was keyed to function...
Richardson initiated the Romanesque revival, drawing on the architecture of castles and fortresses from the turn of the first millenium. The arch, the doors, the turrets, apparently suggest images even to the cursory observer, narrowing the usual gap between the architect's conception and the everyday thoughts of the building's users. But Richardson's importance as an architect comes from his original manipulation of form and space, not from the round arches and towers he took from an earlier era. The scholar Henry-Russell Hitchcock termed Sever "vigorous," and "manly"--a phrase I deplore--and "rather more orderly" than...
...mine calls it "jowly and very heavy--just like Richardson." It should not be forbidding. Perhaps though, it should suggest a two-sided romanticism, an ambivalence best suggested by the main archway. The solid doors open easily-but is there a portcullis hidden within? I sometimes wonder. The arch is very deep: the iron points of the sinister descending gate might be met at any depth. But the arch is also an intimate whispering arch: a murmur spoken into any of the grooves may be clearly heard in the same groove at the opposite side of the doorway...
Brett Donham '60, M. Arch '64, is an architect in Boston. He spent his youth in Neighborhood 10, lived in Agassiz during graduate school, and is now a resident of Neighborhood...