“It doesn’t mean you can’t do something with the building,” she said.

When celebrated poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was a professor at Harvard, donated land to the University in 1870, he mandated that the view from his house on Mount Auburn Street across the river to Allston be unobstructed.

According to Harvard’s 1869-1870 Annual Report, “By the conditions of the gift the tract is to be kept open, or is to be used as the site of such buildings only as are not inconsistent with its use as gardens, public walks, or ornamental grounds.”

That mandate limits construction on much of the land north of Harvard Stadium, where the intramural fields currently sit.

David Westfall, who is the Schipper professor of law and the Gray professor of law, wrote in an e-mail that although he was not aware of the details of the Longfellow bequest, he imagined “that it would not be easy” to get around the restriction.

If HBS’s dormitories on the Charles River were converted into undergraduate housing, they might not be large enough to meet the College’s stated goal of having at least three undergraduate Houses in Allston.

According to David Lampe, the executive director of marketing and communications at HBS, the school has only 425 beds in its buildings on the river. He added that the set-up of the housing was “simple dormitory rooms [off] hallways.”

“It would take a fair amount of renovation to make our existing dorms into Harvard Houses, since they’re dormitories, not Houses,” Lampe said. “They don’t have places for kitchens, tutors, or masters.”

Currently, the average undergraduate House has 395 beds, according to a report issued last year by the College.

Lampe added that the presence of undergraduates on the business school campus would also disrupt HBS’s “self-contained community for business” and force the school to find an alternative location to house its MBA students.

“It’s not our favorite option but we recognize it’s a viable one,” he said.

The construction of undergraduate housing at the third site—between the 1 Western Ave. graduate housing complex and the HBS campus—might also force several HBS buildings to relocate.

While there is a vacant field at the site, the land is constrained by HBS buildings on one side and by graduate student housing on the other. But the option could be combined with converting HBS dorms to create an undergraduate presence directly across the Charles from the current undergraduate Houses on the north side of the river.

MPAC members said that additional sites for undergraduate housing might also be under consideration. Administrators have said that they strongly favor putting new Houses along the river, rather than farther into Allston.

Harvard owns at least one other riverfront property in Allston—the land currently occupied by the Genzyme plant just south of Western Avenue. But Genzyme has a long-term lease on that site until 2057.