Designing a building to accommodate performances, lectures, the dining needs of Harvard first-years and the student center of the Harvard community is a daunting task.

Redesigning a 125 year-old building to house all those functions amidst and above the underground Loker Commons is even more daunting.

Despite these architectural obstacles, the commons are expected to open next fall, and the new dining area may be ready by the spring of 1996.

The challenge for Robert Venturi of the Philadelphia architectural firm Venturi, Scott, Brown and Associates was to modify venerable Memorial Hall's design to perform these duties without damaging its historic character.

"Restoration is bringing the building back to its original condition," Venturi said. "And at the same time there is renovation because the building has to adapt to modified uses."

The signs of this struggle for balance can be seen everywhere in Memorial Hall today.

The design for the new Great Hall, which will serve as a refectory to feed Harvard's 1600 first-years, attempts to balance the needs of the present and the traditions of the past.

Peter J. Riley, the senior project manager of Harvard Real Estate, said the furniture selected for the new first-year dining hall resembles older styles that would have been found there when the hall was used as the dining area decades ago.

Even the lights will be reminiscent of an older age, according to Venturi.

"From old photographs," Venturi said, "we're reproducing old lights from the dining hall, but inserting new [bulbs]. They give the greater light you need in the late 20th century."

Turning the Great Hall into a hightech dining hall necessitated expanding the north wing of Memorial Hall. In place of what had been classrooms, threelevels of kitchen and storage space and twoloading docks now occupy the side of the buildingclosest to Lowell Lecture Hall.

A complex system of ramps and elevators willensure that food travels from the loading docks tothe servery, where Riley says students will haveeasier access to their meals.

"The Freshman Union is very linear," Rileysaid. "Here, people can go here, there,everywhere."

The refectory's design reflects Venturi'sarchitectural philosophy: "Where you have to bemodern, you do not try to disguise it. You admitit and make it recessive."

For example, sprinklers are embedded in woodenbeams, with only the heads exposed. Pipes arerouted through shadows to make them lessnoticeable.

Even the loading docks accessible by truck fromKirkland Street, are recessed behind a wall.