We all know The Harvard Style.

Red brick, first and most important. Hardwood floors. Carved-metal staircase rails. Subtle lighting. And, of course, an impression of age, of well-seasoned stateliness that befits the name Harvard, a university founded almost a century and a half before the Revolutionary War.

Tell that to the residents of Mather Tower.

For some, notorious spurts of new construction during the 1960s and 1970s has meant a Harvard experience encased in a realm of concrete, carpeting and metal window frames.

It was then-President Nathan M. Pusey who in the mid-1950s first broke with tradition when he introduced the "Program for Harvard College."

Amid rapid postwar growth, Harvard was in danger of bursting at the seams. In response, Pusey initiated a "bold plan for improvement of all phases of undergraduate education," according to Harvard: An Architectural History, compiled by Margaret Henderson Floyd.

The program called for some serious fund raising, with proceeds divided between books and new professorships, and building renovations and new construction.

Pusey managed to raise $82.5 million over two years, far outstripping all Harvard fundraising efforts to that date. Some of the building funds went into renovating the Yard dorms, Boylston, Emerson, Harvard and Lehman Halls.

Renovations provided housing for married students and for undergraduates, art facilities, new classrooms, new labs, a theater and a new health center and infirmary.

And the rest of the funds--well, take a quick look upriver.

Poured and Pre-stressed Concrete

The individual designs of the new buildings run the gamut from the functional (i.e.. Currier and Holyoke Center) to the absurd (Science Center, a.k.a. the world's largest camera, and the Carpenter Center). But each building, however, clearly marks a break from the traditional Harvard Style.

"For the first time Harvard use[d] high-rise structures...Open land was running out, and the school was encountering some opposition in attempts to acquire additional land," says Architectural History.

Financial considerations was the other culprit that determined these new looks.

"To perpetuate the elaborate wooden trim and complicated roof structure of Lowell's time, with towers and many dormer windows, was economically impossible," says Architectural History. "Buildings thus came to be constructed of prefabricated elements, of poured and prestressed concrete..."