The Science Center is not only the largest building on the Harvard campus; it is also the largest pre-cast concrete structure ever built anywhere. Pre-cast concrete--which is formed by pouring liquid concrete into molds to form made-to-order planks--allows for extraordinarily quick construction. Using this technique the 400-foot laboratory wing was built in seven months. The technique used in putting together the pre-cast concrete planks resembles the way a child's popsiclestick toy raft is constructed. After the girders are put in place, the thin 60-foot-long planks are laid adjacent to one another and sealed weathertight. In some cases, the sealing has been reinforced with epoxy glue, a cement that when hardened is stronger than the concrete.
The building is composed of four basic sections. The largest section, which runs parallel to the north wall of the Yard, is the laboratory wing forming the back of the building. The lab wing contains four levels of usable lab space topped by two levels of machinery for ventilation and exhaust of chemical fumes.
Running perpendicular to the lab wing is the office wing, which looks like an immense stairway. The top step--the one where the office wing meets the lab wing--is nine stories high. The bottom step, closest to the Yard, is only two stories high.
"The idea was to make it as low as possible on the side of the older buildings, the lower buildings of the Yard," says Jose Luis Sert, the Science Center's chief architect and former dean of the Design School. "We didn't want to break the scale of the buildings in the Yard. We didn't want the Science Center to seem menacing."
The third section of the building is the library wing, a three-level structure running east from the lowest level of the office wing. The library will hold all of the books now in Lamont Library's science collection as well as other more specialized works. Attached to the library is a small administrative section running along Oxford St.
The fourth part of the building is a semi-circular lecture hall section, containing four theatres ranging in size from 150 seats to 500 seats. The lecture halls will be outfitted with expensive and elaborate audio-visual equipment. The most distinctive feature of the lecture wing is the "spider leg" supports which hold the roof aloft. The spider legs are nine bent steel trusses that emanate from the center of the semicircle. They will be left uncovered and allowed to rust until a thick cover of reddish oxides is formed.
The building has a fifth part, but this part is more an addition onto the Science Center than a part of it. It is called the Chilled Water Plant, and it serves as a giant $6.5 million airconditioning unit. The machinery for the plant fills the largest room in the Science Center--a 40-foot-deep basement chamber running along the full length of the building's Oxford St. side.
The machinery will eventually pipe the water up to three roof-top cooling towers which resemble giant dixie cups. When the building becomes ready for occupancy in September, only one of the three cooling towers will be completed. This tower will provide enough cold water to aircondition the Science Center, the Design School's new Gund Hall headquarters, parts of Paine Hall, and other new buildings north of the Yard. The two other cooling towers need additional funding before they can be completed. When, and if, they are completed, the assembly will provide enough chilled water to aircondition nearly every building on the campus now lacking window cooling units.
OTHER PARTS of the Science Center are also suffering from insufficient funding, but none of these appears to be crucial right now. An enormous basement which was to have been used as a lab for teaching science instruction techniques will be left empty. A small astronomical observatory on the top floor of the office wing will be left unfinished.
In 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 supposed 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 to be given to the arts were the first to be cut out," Sert noted.
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 Catalan 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 imitations or fake them, but it would be very difficult," he said. "But I can't imagine how we could build the Science Center in Georgian style."
"The University plant is constantly growing," he continued. "And the Science Center will always be a building of its time just like every building is a building of its time."
Sert sees large buildings as an unavoidable consequence of specialization and over-population. And he believes human beings will become adapted to huge, intricately subdivided places of work. "Human beings are like animals," he says. "They get accustomed to the place they have. Like cats. I have a cat who likes to sleep in its own basket--if you change the basket it might possibly be unhappy. But a few days later it won't even remember the old basket."
There seems to be little choice for students and faculty at Harvard but to become adapted to the Science Center. For if the brick-and-mortar structure of Massachusetts Hall has lasted for 250 years without too much trouble, the concrete-and-epoxy Science Center can be expected to be here long after the comfortable, old buildings of the Yard have turned to dust