Word: sert
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...using the larger site to expand the building to its present size, about 155,000 square feet. While the committee worked out a detailed program, the Corporation made plans to engage an architect. The GSD faculty favored an international competition to select the design firm. According to Jose Louis Sert, dean of the Design School until the summer of 1969. President Pusey disliked the idea of a competition, and the suggestion was scrapped instead, each member of the GSD faculty was asked to submit a list of capable architects...
...particular, many of architect Sert's aesthetic features have been scrapped due to funding cutbacks and inflation. The 420-foot arcade running east-west through the center of the building was going to be decorated with art works: The terraces of the office wing were suppose to have been adorned with plants "sort of like hanging gardens," Sert says. Sert had also hoped to have an outdoor amphitheatre on the roof of the semi-circular lecture hall section. The building's two courtyards were going to be sculpture gardens. "Unfortunately, the parts of the building that were supposed...
...Some of Sert's innovations have remained, however. One of the courtyards will hold a cafeteria, which will have outdoor tables when the weather is warm. And Sert is hoping to negotiate with the Peabody Museum for long-term loans of primitive works of art to decorate the Science Center...
...Sert--a Catalans who left Spain when the Loyalists were defeated in the Spanish Civil War-is sensitive to the criticism directed at the Science Center and his two other Harvard buildings. Holyoke Center and the Peabody Terrace married student dormitories. "You can stick to the old styles or make imitation or take them, but it would be very difficult," he said. "But I can't imagine how we could build the Science Center in Georgian style...
...Sert sees large buildings as an unavoidable consequence of Specialization and over-population. And he believes human being will become adapted to huge, intricately subdivided places of work. "Human beings are like animals," he says...