In early May, the Faculty Council passed a confidential resolution asking Bok and the Corporation to consider relocating or substantially reducing the size of the new dorm. The Council was apparently afraid that the dorm would overcrowd the Yard and look out of place. The Council saw the Hunt Hall site as the last possible site for new construction in the Yard.

At the same time, a group of VES Faculty and students formed a "Save Hunt Hall" Committee and started circulating petitions asking Bok to reverse his decision and preserve Hunt Hall because it is "the only example of its architectural genre in the Boston area."

A week later, the Faculty Council, after examining new plans calling for a reduction in the size of the dorm, reversed its disapproval. The new plans set the capacity of the dorm at 205 students, 33 less than originally planned.

The Save Hunt Hall Committee presented Bok with its petition, bearing 779 signatures, on May 24. Bok said he had weighed aesthetic considerations and concluded that the need for space was more important, so Hunt Hall would be torn down as scheduled.

BOK HAS NOT released the dorm plans, so no one has more than a sketchy idea of what it will look like. It will be made up of several sections connecting to form a rectangle which will be partially open in the corner of the dorm nearest Robinson Hall. A second part of the dorm will lie on the Robinson Hall side of the larger structure. The dorm will be four stories high in most places, although a few sections will rise to five stories. However, even the highest sections will be lower than Thayer Hall. The dorm will almost surely look very similar to the rest of the Yard buildings.

Construction has already started on one new Harvard building. Ground-breaking ceremonies were held May 10 for a $1.6-million addition to the Peabody Museum library, which houses books on anthropology and ethnography. The three-story addition, which will house over 100,000 books, will be named the Tozzer Library after its donor, Alfred M. Tozzer '00, a Mayan scholar and former professor of Anthropology. The library will have, on Bok's orders, a brick facade so that it will preserve the style of the surrounding buildings.

The biggest new building project in the Harvard area, of course, will be the John F. Kennedy Library, which has spawned a small flurry of building by hotel chains who want to cash in on the tourist trade the Kennedy Library will bring to Cambridge.

Kanavos Enterprises, a Cambridge developing firm, will build a 315-room Holiday Inn across from the Harvard Square Post Office, with a projected completion date of June 1974, about two years before the Kennedy Library opens. And another local developer, Graham Gund, announced last month that he will build a 500-room hotel for the Hyatt Regency Corporation, to be opened by mid-1975. Both developers expect a large part of their business to come from visitors to the library.

All this new building brings along with it one major problem: construction. The Pusey Library site is on a bed of rock that will have to be blasted out before construction can start, and Hunt Hall has to be completely demolished, so there will be a considerable noise problem in the Yard this summer and next Fall. And the hole in front of Lamont won't be filled in for at least a year.

Earlier this Spring, Harvard contracted an electrical construction firm to do a delicate wiring job at 17 Quincy St. The firm was about to start the job when it was told to hold off until after the summer, because the blasting next door would jar loose any work that they did. That was quick thinking on Harvard's part, but it will hardly be possible to head off any other damaging effects of construction before they happen.