Rebuilding the Past: Harvard's Beautification Renaissance

In recent years, Harvard has increased its focus on preserving its historic landscapes and buildings.

Harvard hasnt always been interested in preservation. Midday shadows darken the Franklin Delano Roosevelt suite in the Westmorly Court building of Adams House. I am sitting with Michael D. Weishan 86, an acclaimed landscape architect and designer who oversaw the $300,000 restoration of Roosevelts rooms. Everything, with the exception of my iPhone on the table, is as it was in 1904, when Roosevelt graduated from Harvard. Weishan and his team have painstakingly recreated the original opulence of the room, and the result is staggering. The setup isnt larger than that of other rooms in Westmorly, but the level of artistic care and detail, from the meticulously carved linen-fold wooden doors to the sleek Morris chairs, seems impossibly antiquated to my contemporary and begrudgingly utilitarian architectural eye.

After I take in the surroundings, Weishan asks me about my angle for the story. I stumble through something about gardens at Harvard and then improvise about the increasing significance of landscape preservation here. He perks up at this last point. It sounds like thats where the story is, he says excitedly. Hes right. Over the next hour we explore the spotty history of Harvards relationship with preservation. I leave convinced that theres a phenomenon afoot far larger than the recreation of a presidents college rooms: Harvard is experiencing a landscaping renaissance. New ideologies about aesthetics and homage and an unprecedented appreciation of the past have emerged in tandem with modern technological methods to effectively recreate the grandiosity of the Universitys historic look.

THE JOURNEY TOWARDS PRESERVATION

Weishan is extremely prolific. In addition to his work on Adams, he has hosted Victory Gardens, a weekly gardening show on PBS, and heads his own landscape and design firm. To top it off, he boasts a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of the architectural and landscaping history of Harvard and can jump cogently and instantaneously between centuries, Yards, and trends. It is clear that he not only is informed about Harvards relationship with preservation but also cares immensely about its significance and the difficulties attendant on it.

Weishan primarily uses buildings to point to the morphing focus towards preservation, but he insists that the trajectory of landscape preservation evolved in tandem. According to Weishan, the initial construction of these buildings was followed by a period of sentimentality for colonial styles in the early 1900s, and then a period of modernism where everything old was suspect. Now, we are in the midst of a period of appreciation, and some would say reverence, for these historic buildings.

Weishan is openly critical of the mid-century modernist period. During that time, the prevalence of the brutalist architectural style (think Mather House) contributed to the replacement of various classical landmarks by concrete behemoths and asphalt pathways. The University actually thought, until fairly recently, that new was also better, Weishan says. We would routinely bulldoze buildings and put new ones upHolyoke Center is a perfect example of that. These were buildings that were considered revolutionary at the time, but now are by and large considered dysfunctional.

Yet the point of Weishans reflections is not solely to show that Harvard has turned a corner or that the present preservationist movement is more novel than it might appear. It also points to the fickle and unpredictable nature of artistic and architectural appreciation. All this criticism Ive been giving to the Holyoke Center and William James Hall. Who knows? In 50 years they may be considered revolutionary, he says. I highly doubt it, though. He becomes more serious and notes that there was a time in the mid-1950s when President Nathan Marsh Pusey publically criticized Memorial Hall and anything with tinges of gaudy Victorian influence.

The imagined objectivity of the present makes the art of preservation all the more challenging. What if we save the wrong things? What if our re-landscaping is just tacky nostalgia? While these questions are impossible to answer in the present, the preservationist movement, particularly in the landscaping world, is somehow finding a tight-rope thin balance in its approach.

THE ARNOLD ARBORETUM

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Rebuilding the Past: Harvard's Beautification Renaissance