The collection includes pieces from pre-Columbian America and the Byzantine Empire. As the center's libraries and collections have grown, officials say, so has the need for a centralized facility.

But neighbors' activism led to the demise of Harvard's attempt to build this kind of central facility 25 years ago. James Urban, the landscape architect involved in the current project, says that plan was less carefully planned than the new proposal.

Now, Harvard planners say they are attempting a much more sensitive treatment of the garden.

However, the project, "still in the early to middle stages of schematic design," according to architect Richard Williams, is already garnering opposition from various neighborhood and architectural fronts.

A Sacred Place

"What you have to understand is that, for landscape architects, Dumbarton Oaks is a very sacred place--a sacred landscape," explains Clarissa Rowe, a Boston architect and president of Historic Massachusetts Inc., who grew up playing in Dumbarton Oak's Farrand gardens.

Rowe says that even when she was young, the garden inspired her. Since then, she has learned more about Farrand's work and believes strongly in its preservation.

Farrand, who designed the garden when the site was still privately owned in the 1920s and '30s, was the only female founding member of the American Society of Landscape Architecture.