CORRECTION APPENDED

From her comfortable five-room suite in Pforzheimer House, Ealy Ko ’08 considers herself one of the luckiest people at Harvard.

She and her three roommates enjoy what few other undergraduates can claim: singles, a spacious common room, and a skylight to brighten the days in Cambridge’s dreary winters.

By contrast, in many of the neo-Georgian Houses—like Dunster, Leverett, Lowell, and Eliot—residents routinely suffer through painfully small rooms and walk-through suites, primarily because the common rooms built into the original blueprints are now being used as additional bedrooms.

Harvard revealed in March that it would embark on a $1 billion renovation project of all 12 undergraduate Houses over the course of 10 to 15 years, starting as early as 2011. The estimated cost is vastly more than Harvard has ever spent on a single round of House restorations, and is equivalent to the amount the school plans to spend on the new science complex in Allston.

The capital renewal project will entail a full-scale reconstruction of the Houses’ interiors and will improve but maintain their exteriors.

With most Houses accommodating between 400 and 500 undergraduates each year, University Hall administrators are again forced to address the traditional problems of wear and tear, as well as new issues brought on by a changing and growing undergraduate population.

BUILDING UP TO RENOVATIONS

The majority of the Houses were built in the 1930s under then-University President Abbott Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877, who saw residential college life as a way of “promoting a greater interest in things intellectual, supplementing and enhancing formal instruction.”

But as the undergraduate population has continued to expand, the Houses have remained largely the same.

Over their lives, ranging from 38 to 112 years, the renovations that both the interiors and exteriors of the historic structures have undergone have been principally cosmetic.

The only significant restoration took place between 1982 and 1986. That project repaired and upgraded the aging structures, from installing outlets and replacing floors to full redesigns of some of the oldest Quad buildings. Even so, the bill for these renovations was only a fraction of what the upcoming project will cost.

In the wake of a year-long assessment of space and facilities that was completed last summer, the College announced a series of changes over the course of this academic year, intended to help ease the burden of overcrowding on students.

Dunster House administrators declared that many rooms previously classified as doubles would be turned into singles, fewer freshmen would be admitted in the housing lottery, and more seniors would be able to enjoy “senior suites,” which include common rooms. The number of senior suites was also increased in Lowell House, in an effort to minimize the number of rooms that have been deemed unsafe because of how crowded they have been in the past.

In Winthrop House, exceptionally large sophomore and junior classes forced House administrators to reduce the number of senior suites in order to distribute the overcrowding more equitably.

Furthermore, the College announced in March that it would not admit any transfer students for the next two years. The decision was entirely a result of the “unprecedented” housing crunch, according to Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67.

“It was essentially two evils, two very difficult situations,” he said. “You don’t want to disappoint people who apply for admission, but you also don’t want to admit them into a situation that was not a good one.”

‘BEYOND BRICKS AND MORTAR’

The College intends to use the large-scale physical renovations as an opportunity to “look beyond bricks and mortar” in an effort to reevaluate the philosophy of the residential House system, according to Associate Dean for Residential Life Suzy M. Nelson.

“The House mission is integral to the over-arching mission of the College,” she said.

Even though the philosophy behind Harvard’s House set-up is “amazingly contemporary,” Nelson said that the renewal project is the perfect opportunity to reevaluate the modern relevance of the nearly 80-year-old system.

In April, the House Program Planning Committee (HPPC)—a 50-person body of students, faculty members, and planners from Einhorn Yaffee Prescott Architecture and Engineering—began meeting “to examine the mission and purpose of House life and to develop an architectural space plan for the House system,” according to a Faculty of Arts and Sciences press release.

Nelson said that while this aspect of the project is exciting, the process of reconciling potentially incongruous opinions will be the biggest obstacle.

“It’s hard to figure out how to be everything for everyone,” she said, referring to the more than 400 College organizations that often vie for event space in the Houses.

Quincy House Master Lee Gehrke, who chairs HPPC’s subcommittee on academic and social space, said that he has so far heard “nothing shocking” in meetings. Even though the physical interiors of Harvard’s Houses are expected to change dramatically, the needs that they are intended to meet may not.

“Everyone needs to sleep, everyone needs to eat, study,” Gehrke said. “But how we communicate and our recreation needs have changed.”

Nelson said that within the next few months she expects the committee to come up with a set of guiding principles for all the Houses, such as using space more efficiently and promoting student-faculty interaction.

“Students have different needs than they did in 1930,” she said. “They don’t need squash courts, but it would be lovely to have some black box theaters—things that are more contemporary that students would actually use.”

Later in April, the College organized four focus groups of roughly 40 students each, to discuss options for architectural changes.

Nelson said that, in order to ensure a more representative sampling, information from these meetings will be used to create a campus-wide survey on House life that will be administered early this fall.

With brainstorming already well under way, project planners are preoccupied by the significant challenge of finding temporary residences for the hundreds of students who will be displaced when each House is renovated.

Nelson said she expects the College to find suitable “swing space” within the next six months.

“That’s the big question,” she said. “We have to swing into something, and we want it to be pleasant for the students when they get there.”

When Yale began ongoing renovations of its residential colleges, the university built an entirely new, hotel-like residence as swing space. The facility will become a 13th college once all restorations are complete. [CORRECTION BELOW]

At Harvard, administrators have remained ambiguous as to what options are being pursued. For now, Nelson said, no decisions have been made: “Everything is on the table.”

—Staff writer Abby D. Phillip can be reached at adphill@fas.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Charles J. Wells can be reached at wells2@fas.harvard.edu.


CORRECTION APPENDED

The June 5 story, "College Prepares for $1 Billion Housing Renovation," said that Yale's swing space will become a 13th residential college. In fact, Yale Law School will take over the residence in 2012 to provide more on-campus housing opportunities for its students.