Smith Campus Center

Smith Campus Center
South elevation and partial east profile, 2010
Former names	Holyoke Center
General information
Architectural style	Brutalist
Address	1350 Massachusetts Avenue
Town or city	Cambridge, Massachusetts
Country	USA
Coordinates	42.37278°N 71.11861°W / 42.37278; -71.11861
Construction started	1960
Completed	1966
Owner	Harvard University
Height	167 feet (51 m)
Technical details
Floor count	10
Floor area	360,000 sq ft (33,000 m2)
Design and construction
Architect(s)	José Luis Sert
Architecture firm	Sert, Jackson and Gourley

Harvard University's Smith Campus Center (formerly Holyoke Center) is a Brutalist administrative and service building occupying the block bounded by Massachusetts Avenue, Dunster Street, Holyoke Street, and Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, directly opposite the Wadsworth Gate to Harvard Yard. It houses administrative offices, an infirmary of the University Health Services, and a retail/restaurant arcade.

Design

Primarily designed by José Luis Sert (then dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design) and completed in 1966, the Smith Campus Center is an H-shaped ten-story reinforced concrete building. Low-rise portions, including an underground parking garage, have a larger footprint of 360,000 square feet (33,000 m²).

After the first phase of construction in 1963, the Harvard Crimson cited a local joke: "The one nice feature about Holyoke Center is that it's the one place in Cambridge from which you can't see Holyoke Center".  Within a few years the building's novel design and technical features began to present numerous difficulties, which a Harvard official likened to "a five-car accident at an intersection. You just can't tell what caused it."  These included crumbling of exterior structural concrete and an inefficient three-pipe heating and cooling system.

It was Harvard's first highrise building, and has been called a "gray elephant" for the color of its concrete facades.

Artworks

From 1964 to 1979, the penthouse dining room was decorated with five large paintings installed by Mark Rothko, an Abstract Expressionist artist. Due to an unstable paint formulation and high levels of direct sunlight, the pigments faded severely, and the paintings were moved to protective storage. Since their removal, the artworks have been publicly displayed only five times, most recently from November 2014 to July 2015, at the newly-renovated Harvard Art Museums.

Renaming and planned renovation

Originally known as Holyoke Center, in 2013 it was renamed the Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Campus Center. It is scheduled to undergo a "major transformation" starting in 2016, in order to provide "large, flexible indoor gathering spaces for students, faculty, and staff and include food-service, lounge, and study areas, as well as space for exhibitions, events, and performances."