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Chew With Your Eyes Open: Crimson Arts Examines the Aesthetics of Harvard's Dining Halls

By Ankur N. Ghosh,

Look again. Most Harvard students spend a significant portion of their tenure at the College in the dining halls, but few stop between forkfuls of chicken dish X to notice the effect dining halls have on their daily lives. All House dining halls were intended to be communal spaces where House residents could gather at the end of the day to eat like one big, happy family far removed from the vast impersonality of Harvard University, Inc. Each House struggles daily with reconciling institutional efficiency with residential comfort, and each House's architecture reflects an attempt to merge these two forces. Below is a look at four dining halls' attempts to do just that: Eliot House, where institution and residence meet, but don't interact; Currier, where something is lost in the institution's translation of "residence"; Quincy, where the two dance a strange tango; and Mather, where comfort and efficiency unite in Masonic lodge-like splendor.

MATHER

The architect of Mather House (Jean-Paul Carlhian, the man behind New Quincy and Leverett Towers) designed it as both a warmly embracing "community" building and a giant, empty gallery space meant to be filled with art from the University's museums--a perfectly rendered balance between private comfort and public display. For financial reasons, the Unversity's art was never showcased, turning much of the House into an impersonal blank canvas (artes interruptus). Nowhere did this seem more of a problem than the dining hall, which was to encapsulate the gallery feel of the House while functioning as the focal point of student life (Carlhian gave it what he considered to be the best view of the River anywhere in the House).

Yet Mather's dining hall is remarkable for the way in which it defrosts the cold impersonality of Mather the Gallery. Walking into the dining hall proper is like walking into a ski lodge, the warm room beckoning after a day out on the slopes. Sunlight-like light radiates from sunburst-shaped light fixtures. The vastness of empty walls is interrupted by stretches of brick (a comfy building material) and pictures of random groups of house residents (found on walls throughout Mather). These contribute to the friendly atmosphere of the house while covering its empty canvas.

Where Eliot's vastness is oppressive, Mather's seems refreshing. The hall's horizontal expansiveness is divided into different sections, allowing a diner to digest (no pun intended) the immense space of the dining hall in manageable increments. As in Quincy, there is a rectangular central eating area that is flanked on both sides by more intimate commensal spaces. Rather than resolutely delineating spatial boundaries using flanks of columns as Quincy does, Mather separates the private side spaces from the main area with boundaries that are themselves dining spaces (alternating brick walls and tables), seamlessly moving from one dining space to another without the visual interruption of columns. On one side, this boundary separates the central area from the "real world" of Cambridge and the Charles, thus again seamlessly integrating town and gown as Quincy does.

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ELIOT

The warm-and-fuzzy intimacy of the recently designed service area clashes discordantly with the cavernous gloom of the Eliot House dining area. The dining hall does not integrate efficiency and intimacy but grafts the two onto each other like some ghastly sideshow freak. Any dining experience there is a fitful shift between discomfort and comfort, between Harvard and home.

The miniscule square footage of the service area does not stifle the diner with its smallness but embraces him with its grandma's kitchen-like intimacy, achieved through glowing white walls muted with warm lights and dotted with cabinets grandma would love. The service area also avoids the typically antiseptic flavor of the serving area by refraining serving food on warmed platters that students can gather around like a family sharing in a buffet-style dinner.

If grandma presides over the serving area, Death must preside over the dining area. (That's his life-size picture looming down on you from the wall, dressed in black robes and wearing the face of former Harvard President Charles Eliot--Eliot was the creator of the QRR, after all). The checker's table becomes Cerberus, sternly overseeing the passage of souls (read: diners) from savory-baked life to oak-paneled afterlife. The dining hall proper is like a vast tomb where emptiness oppresses from all sides. The endless rows of uninviting conference tables (sprinkled with too-few friendly round tables) are poorly arranged in the room, crowding diners into the center of the dining hall while leaving them surrounded by several square feet of unused floor. Trapping them in from above is the vacuum of dead space between the tops of their heads and the ceiling--a nothing-space accentuated by the barrenness of the undecorated walls of oppressive, dark wood.

CURRIER

If Mather's dining hall is a ski lodge, Currier's is an EconoLodge. Familiarity is a large part of comfort, and most residents are probably familiar with nondescript hotels; making the dining hall into the lobby of one, however, does nothing but conjure up the warmth of tepid coffee from free continental breakfasts. In trying to produce comfort for the masses, Currier stumbled upon mass-produced comfort. The dining hall's attempt to turn its institutional space into a homey place is bipartite: the area tries to hint at the comfort of the natural world (bridging the distance between the ivory tower and the "real world") while hiding any trappings of its functionality.

Currier's HoJo chic is a sad echo of a much higher class establishment, New York City's Four Seasons restaurant, which also tries to encapsulate natural beauty with the 1970s sleek urbanity. In trying to "contextualize" their dining halls, Eliot, Quincy and Mather integrate their natural environment into their dining environment by hinting at the presence of that other environment through windows. Currier forces diners to confront the otherness of the external world by centering the dining environment around a fabricated version of the natural world, a bizarre oasis (several artificial-looking plants and a fountain). It is an amateur echo of the Four Seasons' Autumn Room (where tables are centered around a "grove" of cherry blossoms and a reflecting pool), and the tangential similarity to Japanese gardens recalls the austere asceticism of the Seasons as well as Quincy's slightly more Orientalized vision. The effort can be soothing when the fountain is gurgling, but it mostly looks so out of place and deliberate it only further alienates those eating in the house from feeling comfort or familiarity there.

The hiding of the institutional trappings succeeds fabulously. The serving area is far removed from the dining hall proper, and the salad bar and gaping maw of the tray return are blocked off with a tasteful privacy wall whose carving design is echoed in the columns that mark off the "oasis" from the rest of the dining area--unifying the separating elements of the space. (This is opposed to Quincy, where the separating elements are unified by a similar "ribbed" design but where the salad bar juts obtrusively into the dining space.) The entire room is flooded with light from a skylight that does wonderfully incorporate the natural world into this unnatural place, and a few scattered pictures of other parts of Harvard on the walls do also remind diners of the world outside this far-flung commensal oasis.

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