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Close your eyes and ask yourself, “What does Harvard look like?”

What do you see? Brick buildings, perhaps? Iron gates, Corinthian columns, sweeping façades? You’d be right if you conjured any of the above images, but the campus isn’t just made out of bricks.

In an interview with The Crimson, Haden Guest, a senior lecturer in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies (AFVS) and the director of The Harvard Film Archive (HFA), posed and offered an answer to that very question: “They think about the Yard, about Widener. They think about neoclassicism or fabulous style. They think about these ‘classical’ styles. They don’t think about modernist or brutalist architecture.”

The range of architectural styles at Harvard College is vast, from stately brick and granite edifices to old Victorian manors to sprawling brutalist structures. Individually, each space is rich in history and unique in its relation to campus. Collectively, however, the spaces of campus play a bigger role. The structures together offer what one alone cannot: a tapestry of physical forms that interacts with the lives of thousands of people each day, a collection of intertwined histories that reflect on the past while embracing the future, and a smattering of very different components of the same portrait. What results is difficult to define but easy to recognize: Harvard College.

But, before one can truly see the full architectural portrait of the College, it needs to be broken down into parts.

To start, one space on campus — resting between the dignified bricks of the “classic” Harvard buildings — is the Carpenter Center. Understated and subtle, this structure was completed in 1963 by the renowned Swiss-French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret — more famously known as Le Corbusier — and is the architect’s only North American building. The Carpenter Center falls under the category of brutalist architecture, with its seemingly simple employment of concrete and glass — though, like any artistic creation, it can hardly be understood with just one word.

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To some, the building may seem out of place. To others, it is home to the AFVS department, the HFA, gallery spaces, and studios for painting, sculpture, and woodworking. To many more, it is an architectural pilgrimage site.

Patricio del Real, an associate professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, said, “It’s a building that is difficult to love, one could argue, at first meeting.”

del Real emphasized the uniqueness of the Carpenter Center, noting its careful construction, historical significance, and position on campus. Despite brutalism’s reputation for severity, the Carpenter Center evokes a softness.

“It still has this kind of intimate character, especially in summer or in fall and spring, when the trees are in bloom, where you have this kind of intimate space,” del Real said.

As del Real explained, Le Corbusier constructed the space with a careful consideration of its surrounding environment, its purpose as an educational building, and the needs and desires of its daily visitors. When planning the building’s construction and walking through campus’ center, Le Corbusier identified four elements — or, “essential joys” — of Harvard Yard: “light, space, greenery, and movement,” del Real said.

Of course, Le Corbusier was looking for what makes Harvard Yard “work,” aiming to transform what makes students happy into elements around which the construction of the Carpenter Center could be centered.

He succeeded. Each of these four “essential joys,” in retrospect, are what makes the Carpenter Center resonate with visitors today. It invites light via glass elements that breach the gray concrete, it plays with layers of space with rooftop platforms and sunken courtyards, it features grassy areas and an elevated rosemary garden, and, lastly, it is centered on a S-shaped bridge that pierces the core of the structure.

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“It’s dynamic like no other building. It’s a building that looks completely different on each of its facades. And to me, in that sense, it’s like a work of sculpture. It seems to move as you walk around it and look at it,” Guest said.

The building is, in a sense, a sculpture: an art installation that allows one to better understand not only the structure but the space around it.

“[Le Corbusier] believed in this universal production of the arts and architecture as an artistic endeavor, not as just a functionalist endeavor,” del Real said.

The Carpenter Center was constructed near the end of Le Corbusier’s long career, and, as a result, was a near-perfect culmination of his architectural projects and motifs: “This is the whole of Le Corbusier all in one building. I think that’s also why it’s actually such an important building in the overarching oeuvre,” del Real said.

Despite being a game-changing modernist, Le Corbusier was classically trained, and, unlike many of his counterparts, was vocal about taking inspiration from the ancient Mediterranean world, del Real described. However, his classical inspirations are subtle in comparison to his modern, innovative tendencies. Concrete, for instance, was one of Le Corbusier’s favored materials.

“[Concrete] is a democratic material — a common material. It’s not marble,” del Real said.

Sophie Pratt, gallery and bookshop attendant at the Carpenter Center and a graduate of the Harvard Extension School, pointed to the striking contrast that the building’s material creates within its environment.

“Harvard — and Boston as a whole — is very much a city built of brick. We have a really long history of brick making; A lot of our older buildings are made of brick, so you see that walking on campus. And so, putting a concrete building right next to everything is an interesting twist on that,” she said.

From his ancient inspirations to his love for concrete, Le Corbusier was able to include every side of himself in the construction of this building: “It’s one of these moments where architecture starts to reflect also on personalities, on ideas, but also on an aesthetics — they’re all kind of crossing and creating this kind of mesh,” del Real said.

Surprisingly, Le Corbusier only visited the site twice and never saw the finished result. According to del Real, the project wouldn’t have been possible without the collaborative efforts of Josep Lluís Sert — a trusted friend of Le Corbusier and integral figure in the project — co-designer Julian de la Fuente, and engineer William de Mistura, who helped structurally achieve “the vision of Le Corbusier.”

“Architecture is always a collaborative work,” del Real said.

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One of the most important parts of the building is its steadfast commitment to its purpose. The Carpenter Center is and has always been a center for the arts. Beyond his work as an architect, Le Corbusier also painted and sculpted, and his profound understanding of artistic production is evident throughout the building, where, as Guest said, glass-walled studios act as “beehives of activity.”

“As you go in the studios and you see the drips of paint from past decades in some of the sinks, and so there’s a patina of history of a kind that you don’t often see; of actual use and late nights spent at the end of the semester completing projects,” Guest said.

This commitment to space and purpose doesn’t have to be proven; It’s clear in how people interact with the Carpenter Center today.

“It’s a space with a great aura, and those students who can take a class and make work within it, or study film or watch film, I think they have — it’s a truly unique experience, because it’s one imbued with the history of the space and architecture and the College,” Guest said.

Though much of the building is reserved for Harvard affiliates, the structure’s open design makes it accessible to the public as well.

“We see people come up and down these ramps quite a lot,” Pratt said. “There’s some regulars that take their daily walks, and guys bring their skateboards, and people bring their dogs.”

It’s difficult to create a piece of art that does everything it needs to do — for it to reflect one’s own interests and aesthetic, for it to satisfy its patrons and visitors, for it to withstand the test of time. 60 years later, however, and Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center still stands, sinking into the spring grass amid budding trees, offering solace to students and artists, joggers and cyclists, and the pilgrims who have traveled far and wide to take a seat in its rosemary garden, enjoying the view of Harvard Yard.

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—In his column “Building Harvard College,” Thomas A. Ferro ’26 surveys a collection of notable structures that define the College’s campus. He can be reached at thomas.ferro@thecrimson.com.