The Inn's relationship to the street is a concern of John Pitkin of the Central Cambridge Neighborhood Association, who calls the Inn "an inward-looking building rather than an outward-looking building."

"We'd like to see [the architects] treat it as a public space," Pitkin says of the building.

Too Traditional?

Like the Inn, the DeWolfe St. project is designed to fit in with its neighboring river houses. The building, which faces Quincy House, is similar to the river houses in scale and in surface details such as the red brick and white window frames, says John Clancy, the project's architect.

Clancy says that he wanted the building to have as much variety as possible in order to achieve a "residential feel." He says that has been accomplished through the use of dormer windows on the roof and bay windows on the face of the building.

The building's traditional design has met with both praise and criticism from those who have followed the plans.

"To me, it feels like a condominium project rather than a student dorm," says Lecturer in Architecture Jeremiah Eck, who is also a practicing architect in Boston.

Eck calls the DeWolfe design an example of "dry traditionalism. This one doesn't make enough of a reference to the contemporary edge that you would expect in the 1990s."

But Didier O. Thomas, the University's associate director for project planning, says the building could not have made a strong architectural statement.

"I think having a traditional design, where the scale was more residential, was the thing to do," Thomas says. "The neighborhood is pretty chaotic architecturally, and we wanted to create a kind of background piece."

Eck disagrees. "You have a context and either you're working with the context or not," he says. "It's pretty hard to be a background piece in that position."

Hugh A. Russell '64, an architect who sits on the Cambridge Planning Board, says that DeWolfe will have a positive impact on the street's architectural character because it will attract attention away from a neighboring eyesore.

"I always felt that Quincy House, where I lived for three years, was ugly," Russell says, adding that DeWolfe should make the scene better from a pedestrian point of view."

Too Contemporary?

The most ambitious, and least traditional, of the three buildings is Werner Otto Hall, which will be the new home of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. For this building, fitting in with the surroundings has been especially important because it faces the untraditional Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, the only North American building designed by the famous Swiss architect LeCorbusier.