Still, Dixon and Harvard administrators stress that they may incur unanticipated costs.

“Sometimes we encounter unforeseen circumstances, like soil conditions, building conditions in renovations or mitigation costs,” writes Kathy A. Spiegelman, Harvard’s associate vice president for planning and real estate, in an e-mail.

Learning by Example

The sheer size and scope of the University’s dreams of expansion are all but unprecedented. Few schools have built new campuses from scratch recently.

The Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, located in Needham, Mass., opened its doors this year to 30 “partners”—students who will enter the 100-person Class of 2006 after evaluating the school for a trial year.

Joe Hunter, director of communications at Olin, says the campus’ first phase of construction, to be completed this summer, will cost a total of $120 million.

This cost includes the construction of four buildings—a residence hall, a student center, an academic center and a classroom building—that together will total almost 300,000 square feet—roughly a third of the size of the Law School.

But because nobody knows what types of buildings the Allston campus will include, the Olin comparison only provides a starting point for projecting Allston costs.

Recently constructed Harvard buildings might provide a better estimate of Allston costs.

Completed in 1999, the 980,000-square-foot Maxwell Dworkin building, home to the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the computer science department, cost $26 million.

Finding Funds

Figuring out the requirements for the new campus and the subsequent costs is only the beginning of the process, however. Once the figures have been nailed down, the University must begin discussing where that money will come from.

Last spring, the University voted to set aside central administration money in a special five-year infrastructure fund that will pay off debt on the land acquisitions in Allston and cover the costs of preparing the land for eventual construction.

Although Harvard has not yet begun any actual land preparation, Huidekoper says she expects that the University will use up the infrastructure fund quickly.

“We’ll see how far it’ll go,” she says. “It’s very expensive to buy and prepare land.”