Harvard announced this summer that Carpenter and Co. paid an undisclosed sum for the lease with an option to buy the site after 20 years.

The property is assessed at $2.31 million and the existing building at $1.78 million. Harvard purchased the property in 1982.

Many builders said they will be glad to see the Motor House leave the skyline. "That's a monstrosity," said developer Louis F. DiGiovanni. "Anything would be better than that." And Spiegelman conceded, "It's a building that doesn't have much in the way of architectural character, the way it floats on those decks of parking."

Spiegelman said that of all the Motor House's critics, "the people who feel most that way are Carpenter and Co. because their major project is sitting across the street from what is considered an eyesore."

According to Carpenter's President John Hall, the new building will make the area more attractive. He said the Charles complex's shops are now "isolated by a two-and-one-half-block area" of snarled traffic and streets that seem unfriendly to pedestrians. "This southwest sector of the Square needs to be finished," he said.

Close by, the three other developers are cooperating to reshape the block housing Crate and Barrel, The Harvest Restaurant, and the Mt. Auburn St. Post Office.

Thirsty students may be saddened to learn that only a crater remains of several bars and restaurants: the Picadilly Filly, the Ha'Penny Pub, Vincent's, and The Blue Parrot.

DiGiovanni's Trinity Realty Co. razed the former Harvard dorm at 119-123 Mt. Auburn St. this July. City agencies have cleared his plans to replace it with a four-story brick edifice like the one housing Words Worth Bookshop in Brattle Square.

The project, to be known as One Mifflin Place, would open a walkway through the building housing Brattle Street's Crate and Barrel store and DiGiovanni's complex to Mt. Auburn St.

DiGiovanni has offered to lease the new building to its former tenants, but only the "Filly" and the Blue Parrot, which have a common owner, have said they will return.

The project's architect, The Architect's Collaborative (TAC), has offices along the passageway. TAC recently sold its building to Harvard, leasing back its offices from the University.

DiGiovanni's is the only Harvard Square construction project of the latest crop that has satisfied city regulators. The others must still brave the Zoning and Planning Boards and the Historical Commission.

Adjunct Professor of Business Administration William Poorvu, whose family owns the buildings on both sides of the former site of these favorite watering places, plans to replace the rear of his white frame building at 40 Brattle St. with a six-story office building. Club Casablanca, which now occupies that space, would move to the front of the building, taking its famous murals along.

Another element of this cooperative effort will be to replace the Cherry, Webb and Touraine (CWT) clothing store's building with a taller office building. Replacing that building, which is the closest to Brattle Square, would have to be done in partnership with the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, which owns the air rights to the structure because a tunnel for Harvard Square buses runs underneath it.

A fight may be shaping up over the CWT developers' plan to build their project at night to avoid blocking the bus tunnel. City Councilor Alice K. Wolf said the noise of night construction would legally constitute an "environmental hazard" to nearby apartment-dwellers.