The Barker Center has created "an attractive common space where we can all be situated in proximity to each other as opposed to our former condition of being scattered around several somewhat cramped buildings,"

Marquand Professor of English Lawrence Buell, who is chair of the English department, wrote in an e-mail message.

The center is a product of a new push by the University to integrate departments. But, Buell wrote, the Barker Center has failed to bring all of Harvard's humanities departments under one roof. Literature, Romance Languages and Literatures, Classics and others remain scattered around the campus.

"But to the extent that there IS a center, yes, Barker has become it," Buell wrote.

The $20 million Maxwell-Dworkin Center for computer science and electrical engineering has moved DEAS classes out of the large science center lecture halls and into rooms designed to fit the needs of students.

Some small lecture halls are equipped with microphones at each seat and high-tech image projectors.

Scheduled to be inaugurated on Oct. 12, the center facilitates lab work for students, and the new, more-open amphitheater allows lecturers to have more interaction with their classes, according to Gates Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering H.T. Kung, chair of computer services.

"Now we have our own place," Kung said. "Before people were spread over multiple buildings."