Word: sert
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Jose Luis Sert, Dean of the Faculty of Design, last night said that Holyoke Center and the married students dorms provide Harvard with "a livelier environment...
Over the past year the CRIMSON has waged an unflagging campaign against Jose Luis Sert, Dean of the Faculty of Design, and his buildings in Cambridge. For the most part, the paper's attacks have used vicious ridicule. Last August, for example, the Harvard Summer News (the CRIMSON's summer alias) printed a picture of the Married Students Housing Center with the caption, "University Moves to Thwart Early Marriages...
...still hears grumbling about "that monstrosity on Mt. Auburn Street" and an occasional nasty joke ("The one nice feature about Holyoke Center is that it's the one place in Cambridge from which you can't see Holyoke Center"), but the community in general seems remarkably complacent about the Sert buildings going up around...
...Dean Sert's disciples are quick to point out that CRIMSON editors have no business calling Holyoke Center ugly because they are not architectural critics. But if I accept this argument, I cannot protest anything foisted upon me. Although I may have no business criticizing Holyoke Center, I have to look at it every day and live with it. An unattractive building, unlike an unattractive painting, disfigures more than someone's living room: it is in the public esthetic domain. Had Dean Sert built his building in his back yard away from civilization, I would keep silent. He built...
What Dean Sert has done to Mt. Auburn Street does not represent a random lapse of good sense. Dean Sert has done the same thing, only worse and in more colors, to Boston University with his Student Union building. The Married Students Housing Center looks to me well on the way to being just as hideous. Those of us who shudder whenever we see Holyoke Center looming up beyond Grays Hall can only hope that the administrators who choose designs for future Harvard buildings will prevent Dean Sert from doing any more damage to the University and its environs...