Word: carlhian
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Living in Mather House often feels like being the butt of a joke, and one that ceased to be amusing a long time ago at that. But at a Mather Senior Common Room event on Monday night, Jean Paul Carlhian, architect of Mather House (and also New Quincy and Leverett Towers), offered his rebuttal: Mather, it turns out, was intended to be a concrete monstrosity—sort...
Harvard itself, he said, is the main perpetrator of this crime so many students call home: The land allocated to create Mather wasn’t large enough to build an entirely low-rise building (which would have been brick) and still accommodate the designated number of students, so Carlhian had to design a high-rise. For structural and aesthetic reasons, Carlhian explained, it made no sense to design a 14-story high-rise of brick—thus the concrete-aggregate form and revolution in Harvard dormitory housing. The interiors were purposefully designed as bare concrete: ever-changing blank...
...mostly-Mather audience listened obediently to Carlhian’s extensive and entertaining justification of his own design features. “There is a reason for everything,” he said. Carlhian revealed that the chairs in the dining hall had to be both large enough for heavy football players and unbreakable so as to withstand tipping over when the “clumsy guys” stood up—a test of sturdiness that the architect demonstrated for his audience. In the suites, bathrooms were placed so that “a man should be able...
...architect of Mather House (Jean-Paul Carlhian, the man behind New Quincy and Leverett Towers) designed it as both a warmly embracing "community" building and a giant, empty gallery space meant to be filled with art from the University's museums--a perfectly rendered balance between private comfort and public display. For financial reasons, the Unversity's art was never showcased, turning much of the House into an impersonal blank canvas (artes interruptus). Nowhere did this seem more of a problem than the dining hall, which was to encapsulate the gallery feel of the House while functioning as the focal...
University officials, in consultation with Mather's architect, Jean-Paul Carlhian, and the Turner Construction Company, the firm submitting the lowest original bid, worked out a series of technical modifications worth a half-million dollars in construction savings. On November 7, the University agreed to contract with Turner, and excavation began shortly after. Occupancy, Wiggins said, is still scheduled for September...