Having realized the impracticality of renovating an entire residential college in a single summer after its experience with Calhoun College in 1989, Yale decided to embark on a new and comprehensive series of renovations.

The university began work at Berkeley College in 1998 and, from then on, proceeded to renovate a different college at the rate of about one per year, with each college taking an average of 15 months to complete.

Similarly, the renovation of Old Quincy House is projected to take 15 months in total, according to a January Harvard press release.

As the 2012 start date for the renovation approaches, Harvard administrators have confirmed that accessibility for students with disabilities and sustainability efforts will likely be among the initiative’s top priorities.

Yale contractors attempted to integrate more beds into each College as part of a larger effort to increase the size of Yale’s undergraduate class. No similar goal has been reported for the Harvard renovations.

Jonathan S. Holloway, master of Calhoun College, says that these issues, in addition to bringing facilities up to fire code, were extremely important during the Yale residential college renovation.

“This was an opportunity to physically restore the buildings and to make them better adapted to the lifestyles of late 20th century and early 21st century students,” Yale School of Architecture Dean Robert A. M. Stern says.

With goals akin to those of its counterpart in New Haven, Harvard has retained the services of the same architectural firm behind the renovation of half of the Yale colleges. KieranTimberlake, a Philadelphia-based company, has also tackled projects at Cornell, Middlebury, and the University of Pennsylvania as well as at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C.

A MATTER OF MONEY

In September 2006, Yale announced an ongoing capital campaign that seeks to fund improvements across the university, including renovations to its residential colleges. The campaign, known as “Yale Tomorrow,” aims to raise $3.5 billion by July 1, 2011.

That the university had to embark on a capital campaign to fund the large-scale renovations speaks to the enormous costs associated with residential renovations.

Estimates for the price tag of House renewal at Harvard have hovered between $1 billion and $1.3 billion. At Yale, the university had invested over $500 million into the construction process by November 2007, with four colleges then yet to be renovated.

Even after Yale’s endowment plummeted during the financial crisis—falling by nearly a quarter to $16.3 billion in the 2009 fiscal year—Yale refused to scale back on the construction, according to Morse College Master Frank C. Keil.

“The president and the corporation were convinced that because [college renovation] had been so successful in the past, they weren’t going to cut back,” Keil says.

Harvard faced a 27.3 percent loss in its endowment during the 2009 fiscal year—the largest single year decline in its history—but amid that decline, Harvard administrators similarly continued to assert the importance of House renewal. In an op-ed in The Crimson at the end of 2008, Harvard President Drew G. Faust, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Michael D. Smith, and Dean of the College Evelynn M. Hammonds reiterated their support for House renewal, vowing to ensure that “Harvard’s nearly 80-year-old experiment in House life continues, updated and energized.”