Word: carlhain
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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Someone told me that the only way to understand Mather House is to go there tripping. In many ways, that's understandable. Concrete spaces, elephantine rock thrusts, and dazzlingly white panels of light do have a poetics of their own. But something Carlhain said after he spent an evening with melancholy Mather residents indicates that he understands the central problem. "If you build a building and you find that people are unhappy with it, you become unhappy, too . . . So no, no, I'm not happy...
Jean Paul Carlhain, a member of the firm of Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott (which has designed, among other buildings, Dunster, Leverett, and Quincy Houses), is the architect of Mather House. I asked him if the angle of the Mather House tower was the one he had chosen-if, in fact, he was aware that the only windows which looked out on Harvard and the Charles were in the bathrooms. "Oh, yes," he said, "I don't believe in the Atlantic City 'I-can-see-the-ocean!' school of windows." He said he felt that the view of Peabody Terrace...
...courtyard is the center of the House," said Carlhain, and it is hard to disagree. But what poses for courtyard in Mather House is a dead space, a savannah so criss-crossed with mammoth concrete walks that the oddly shaped patches of grass which remain to intrude might well be the gravesites of tired isosceles triangles. The lack of large or central trees was also planned: "I wanted the students to be able to play frisbee...
...room for a minute," said a senior occupying a tower single, "I leave my room and go look at the elevator door for a while." Shared bathrooms, too, add to the Sigma Chi atmosphere of tower life. "We wanted to encourage a sense of House communality," said Carlhain, explaining the concept of togetherness which led him to abandon the Quincy formula of private baths...
Mather has no artwork, either. Although Carlhain designed some genuinely imaginative art for the House (an enormous clock to fit inside the library's circular staircase, a huge dining hall mural spewing skim milk from trompe l' oeil spouts), all of it was eliminated in the budget trimming which also deprived the student rooms of carpeting and closet doors. Noise pollution, too, is a problem: there is no division between bedrooms in the doubles, and it has been suggested that at Mather, the sound of one hand clapping in the Dining Hall can be heard in the Junior Common Room...