Where Did Those Come From?

Chairs in the Yard detract from Harvard’s ambiance

By Jordan A. Monge

After a summer at home surrounded by the stucco and cement of southern California, I was looking forward to the beautiful Georgian architecture of Harvard College. Imagine my surprise when I returned to fair Harvard only to find the beauty of the buildings marred by the psychedelic chairs populating the Yard. Their presence was painfully obvious; somehow, they had been strewn haphazardly all the way to Annenberg.

This infestation stems from the efforts of the “Common Spaces” project, which sought to create new areas on campus for students to intermingle and socialize. While this end may have succeeded to a certain extent, it has been at great æsthetic expense.

In announcing “Common Spaces,” President Drew Gilpin Faust explained that the project would create “visible, attractive, and inviting campus ‘focal points.’” She failed to mention that these “focal points” would also be eyesores.

The chairs’ gauche pink, blue, and yellow hues would be unattractive enough on their own (one visiting MIT student described them as “tacky chair circles”), but their juxtaposition with the beautiful buildings surrounding them only exacerbates the visual cacophony.

The thick cables locking the chairs together to prevent theft don’t help matters. Obviously some security precautions were necessary to protect Harvard’s investment (though I might prefer that the chairs were removed), but the cables serve as an unsightly reminder that even a project specifically intended to welcome Harvard students and the greater Cambridge community cannot ignore the banal concerns of Harvard’s urban setting.

And æsthetics isn’t the only problem. These “chair circles” and those sitting in them have become a backdrop for tourists, who practically line up to take pictures reclining among Harvard students. Ironically, these same chairs destroy the milieu that the tourists come to see. Rather than appreciating the grandeur and serenity of Harvard’s ivy-covered brick walls, they are confronted by weirdly whimsical seating arrangements.

Such endeavors to give Harvard a facelift often occur out of an urge to reduce the university’s past to a distant and distasteful memory. To many professors and administrators, the ivy-covered walls are a reminder of our history, replete with the stains of sexism, racism, and Puritanical religiosity.This painfully modern effort to make Harvard’s atmosphere “fun” and “social” is in some respect an attempt to expunge the institution’s politically incorrect past from memory. Harvard, as fantastic as its current students may be, is defined by its history. I cannot help but feel that the imposition of “chair circles” and Mather’s Brutal(ist) architecture are a sort of reverse imperialism of the modern, forcing us to accept inferior standards of beauty for the sake of rejecting the old.

Instead of updating Harvard’s look to give it a friendlier feel, I propose we try to preserve its glorious past: the erudition and excellence that have attracted millions of visitors from across the globe. We could have at least used chairs of a nobler color—crimson, perhaps?—or returned to the wooden ways of our past. Actually, the project was somewhat more successful in the Quad, where wooden Adirondack chairs compliment the architecture very well. Although the occasional solitary chair precludes the possibility of the project’s being picturesque, the Quad’s æsthetic has not been completely destroyed. Quadlings will continue to gather on the field in greater numbers to share dinner, read, and converse with each other.

At least until the snow hits, which is to say nothing of the rain. September’s inclement weather has revealed yet another glaring problem: Cambridge’s climate prevents any outdoor area from serving as a community space during at least a third of the year, the very time students most need a communal gathering place to avoid the ice, frost, and snow.

While the idea of promoting student conversation is a good one, the natural limitations of the Common Spaces project makes me wonder whether it was worth the cost. Some students argue that the monetary expense could have saved another janitorial job or two; everyone can agree that this is hardly the best use of resources given the present budget crisis.