Around a Mass. Hall conference table two weeks ago sat a dozen men and women steeped in culture and the finer arts.

The director of the Harvard University Art Museums was there, the man who oversees its vast empire of 160,000 pieces. So was the head of the Office for the Arts, who ensures that undergraduates have the resources they need to pursue their creative ventures. As was the executive director of the American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge’s premiere theater troupe. And the head of the Peabody, Harvard’s world-renowned anthropological museum.

This long-awaited meeting assembled the biggest players in the high-stakes battle that’s taking shape over how culture will fit into Harvard’s new Allston campus.

The dozen arts leaders had met twice before, last spring, and they had expected to reconvene the Advisory Group on Physical Planning for Arts, Culture and Museums again early this fall.

But as the meeting was postponed, they began to wonder what had happened and worry about losing the momentum they had built last spring.

In the meantime, the needs had grown more acute on all sides.

The art museums had expected to enter this semester ready to build a major modern art museum in Cambridge, but the whole idea was scrapped over the summer in the face of relentless community protests.

Meanwhile, student dancers began to realize that their prized Rieman Dance Center would be turned over to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in just over two years and that a replacement was nowhere to be found.

Allston holds promise for securing these arts institutions the space they so desperately desire, but the campus arts worry about winding up across the river from students’ daily lives.

When Harvard has tried to expand in recent years, the focus has been on constant clash between the University and the city of Cambridge. But when it comes to divvying up space for the arts in Allston, the first and most formidable challenge will be getting the University to agree with itself.

“A university committee takes a notoriously long time to complete its business, especially when, as in this case, there are so many different and even competing agendas,” art museums Director James Cuno wrote in an e-mail. “Working through the university process will be just as cumbersome as working through the public process.”

The difficulties of planning make committee members pause before investing too much hope in Harvard’s latest venture.

Nevertheless, around the table last month, they spent two-and-a-half hours launching into that process full throttle, jockeying for influence with the central administrators who will determine Allston’s future this summer—arts and all.

Museums Maneuver for Space

One battle line falls between student group interests and the expansion of Harvard’s established cultural institutions.

University administrators unanimously agree that culture and the arts must be represented in Allston, and all indications are that museums will be first.

All the scenarios Harvard’s hired planning firm has proposed involve moving at least some of the University art museums and other institutions, such as the Peabody and the Museum of Natural History.

Allston is hailed as a remedy to space problems—both for the acreage across the river and for the real estate that will be freed up in Harvard Square.

But this expansion will take years and most likely outlast the administrators who are currently fighting the battle.

“We’re only just beginning that conversation,” says Office for the Arts director Jack Megan. “What ought Harvard to be providing in terms of space not five, ten, 15 years out, but decades?”

Nor will the committee make any final decisions on allocating space in Allston. Instead, Megan says, the group will “inform the broad thinking about Allston.”

The advisory group has framed these long-term questions in terms of two likely scenarios previously ironed out by University planners: moving one or more graduate schools or relocating the sciences.

According to committee members, planners presented them with likely options for the museums under each scenario. If science labs are moved to Allston, the museums might wind up on the University’s 30-acre parcel in Watertown, just up the street on the Cambridge side of the Charles. Or if graduate schools relocate, the museums could accompany them.

Cuno says he worries about the implications for undergraduate academic life if the art museums move entirely to Allston.

The museums serve a teaching function, according to Cuno. Without “vast improvement to the transportation system between the Yard and Allston,” they would lose that capacity and be relegated to a weekend destination.

When planners recommended relocating the museums, Cuno says, they based their idea on a crude comparison of the total square footage the museums occupy in Harvard Square with the amount of space in Allston that could be set aside for the arts.

“They didn’t in any way place the museums in any particular place or describe anything about us…or take into account anything about the museums,” he says. “It wasn’t anything but a very gross or macro look at all of this without any attention to detail.”

Allston could address the inadequacy of the art museums’ current facilities, according to Cuno, but only so long as they get to keep their land in Cambridge too.

The art museums have room to display only a small fraction of their total collection. Allston could provide office space and off-site storage, as well as temporary exhibition space. That would relieve pressure on the University’s famed museums, which would stay next to the Yard.

“I think the museums need space that this side alone can’t provide,” Cuno says. “It’s clear that the future will require developing at other sites. And it’s likely, and probably helpful, that it be in Allston.”

For the other museums, like the Peabody, crossing the Charles could bring much needed upgrades to facilities, according to University Provost Steven E. Hyman, whose office chairs the Allston planning process.

He says that officials at the natural history museum, for example, worry about the structure of its present building and how vibrations are affecting its famed collection of glass flowers.

Inside the Committee

For a committee that will hold only a couple more meetings and that will not even issue a final report or recommendation, the Advisory Group on Physical Planning for Arts, Culture and Museums has already run into its share of snags.

Scheduling difficulties have slowed the committee’s progress. This fall, the provost’s office did not send out a schedule for meetings until early November.

The delay was due to “staffing changes and scheduling complications,” according to Sean Buffington ’91, the assistant provost who coordinates the committee.

“I’m not sure what the effect of the delay in meetings is,” Cuno says. “I suspect it will have more effect on the speed with which the University can gather its information than on any real development of Allston itself.”

Its discussions address only general questions and in addition to Hyman are attended by the architectural firm that is consulting on Allston development.

“What we’re trying to get people to do is to think big, to share, to be a resource for architectural and development consultants,” Hyman says. “We can’t ask people who are thinking about dance to engage in architectural plans. The point is only to hear what people’s hopes are, [and] draw useful scenarios.”

Although Hyman and Buffington say students’ needs are at the forefront of Allston development, the committee membership does not include any Harvard undergraduates. But Hyman insists they will still be involved.

“We’re going to engage lots of students,” he says. “As we think about Allston, it will have an enormous impact on student life.”

“It would seem to me that in…ºan advisory capacity, student input should be taken into account,” Cuno says. Allston development “is presuming benefit to students, and students will be among the best to advise us on such benefits, and particularly the location of such benefits.”

Building Blocks

Committee members say it is still too early to know what student facilities, if any, might find a home in Allston.

And the time-frame on Allston development may be too distant to help remedy the immediate space crunch for student dance and theater groups, which soon will lose the Rieman center and, temporarily, the run-down Hasty Pudding building.

According to planners, the potential lies five to ten years in the future.

“It has extraordinary potential for the performing and visual arts at Harvard, including a smaller second stage for use by the A.R.T. and others,” says Robert J. Orchard, the company’s executive director.

Megan says one of Allston’s biggest benefits for students will come from entire buildings that open up in Harvard Square as other entities move.

The distance to Allston means Harvard may be reluctant to build primarily student-oriented facilities there.

Megan says he thinks accessibility is crucial, especially since student actors frequently work late into the night.

“Overwhelmingly, arts facilities need to be developed on this side of the river for students,” he says. “But I’m not of the belief that students should never venture across the Charles.”

Buffington says that planners will keep this in mind but that he nonetheless sees a place for student resources across the river.

“I think students tend to travel great distances for things they care about,” he says.

One possibility that consultants presented at the meeting would locate cultural resources throughout Allston, rather than simply placing them as near to the old campus as possible.

Under this possible approach, students would have to travel through Allston on the way to their activities, thus integrating the arts into the overall life of the neighborhood.

Megan says he thinks Allston will bring new perspectives to Harvard students, and vice versa.

“It’s integration into the Allston community that creates a two-way street,” Megan says. “That community has a lot to offer in terms of culture and diversity. Allston has its own history that is distinct from Cambridge.”

As Harvard expansion begins to change that Allston history, Cuno says the integration will take years.

“One should start out flexibly and see how things develop,” he says. “A campus, like a city, grows organically, and one can’t predict entirely the culture of that particular development.”

—Catherine E. Shoichet, Jenifer L. Steinhardt and Elisabeth S. Theodore contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer J. Hale Russell can be reached at jrussell@fas.harvard.edu.