USA: After 20 Years Safdie's Harvard Hillel Building Retains its Charms

Cambridge, MA. Rosovsky Hall (Harvard Hillel). Moshe Safdie, arch., 1994. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2015

 Cambridge, MA. Rosovsky Hall (Harvard Hillel). Moshe Safdie, arch., 1994. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2015

 Cambridge, MA. Rosovsky Hall (Harvard Hillel). Moshe Safdie, arch., 1994. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2015

USA: After 20 Years Safdie's Harvard Hillel Building Retains its Charms
by Samuel D. Gruber

A few months ago I wrote about the Hillel House at Trinity College in Hartford, CT., one of several attractive new centers for Jewish life erected on or near American college campus in recent years.  The practice of employing good modern design for campus Hillel buildings dates to the 1950s and 1960s, when Max Abramovitz and Sydney Eisenshtat were engaged to design modest modern structures for the University of Illinois, Northwestern University and the University of Southern California. The fact that those architects were Jewish (and alumni) probably made their work especially attractive to Hillel sponsors.

In the early 1990s, when Harvard's Jewish machers decided to build a new home for Hillel on Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge, just a block from Harvard Yard, they turned to star Jewish architect Moshe Safdie for the design.  Ground was broken on March 17, 1993 and the building opened in 1994. 

Safdie wrote that:

“The building's centerpiece is a circular courtyard defined by three skylit, vaulted spaces that open onto Plympton Street. The versatile green space, enclosed by load-bearing steel columns, can accommodate a sukkah during festivals. On the building's ground floor is a student lounge, dining hall, and a multi-purpose room. Upper floors feature a library, offices, and multi-purpose rooms for worship and meetings. Clad with brick and pre-cast concrete, the building has a leaded copper roof.”

On a visit in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this week I toured the building to see how it was doing after 20 years.  Happily, it still looks good, and if it was springtime I'd have seen the wysteria that wraps much of courtyard in bloom. The building still offers a range of Jewish religious and social activities, and it also rents rooms to others in chronically space-starved Cambridge. The courtyard isn't really a green space - since it is paved piazza - good for outdoor dining and shmoozing in good weather, but wasted in winter. But otherwise the intended spaces work as they were planned, though like many modern buildings with lots of glass and metal, the engineering of the building coupled with decades of Massachusetts winters can cause headaches for the building maintenance staff.

The Riesman Center for Harvard Hillel, Rosovsky Hall, as it is named, has a small urban footprint but packs a lot of varied space into its compact form. The building is smaller in size and more modest in appearance than photos suggest. It hugs the corner site tightly, and the red brick cladding (over a concrete skeleton) blends with the surrounding Cambridge colors and textures. There really is no main facade, but the entrance at a cut corner on the Mount Auburn street side is marked by an open entrance tower - and this flags the passage to the passerby. For the newcomer, though, it is exceptionally modest, and I walked around the building first to make sure there was no other more public access. This tower door combines a sense of openness to the (literally) narrow needs of security. As an image for the building, the tower recalls one designed many years ago by Percival Goodman for his synagogue in Gary, Indiana (1952-54). Of course, we are now familiar with this type of open tower attached to parking garages, train platforms, pedestrian bridges and a host of other applications.

 Gary, Indiana. Temple Beth El. Percival Goodman, arch. Photo from Religious Buildings for Today (1957)

Gary, Indiana. Temple Beth El. Percival Goodman, arch. Photo from Religious Buildings for Today (1957)

Seen from Mount Auburn Street the modern form of the tower contrasts sharply with the Georgian Revival tower of the nearby Lowell House (1930). Inside the tower, on the second floor of the building is a small solarium used as a study or meeting room. It provides an airy eyry about Mount Auburn Street.

Besides the, tower, the standout architectural elements are the two barrel vaults that surmount the tops rooms of the two wings. These copper-clad forms soften the building profile while at the same time suggesting some grandeur within. Indeed, the spaces beneath this vaults are airy light-filled rooms used regularly for prayer services.  There are four separate prayer groups active in the center; some use space on the ground floor and others in the vaulted spaces up top - which are reached by a central curved stairway, The vaulted rooms have window-filled side walls facing the courtyard, and they also have skylights set in the middle of the vaults.  The vaults recall the well-known long barrel vaults used by Louis Kahn at the Kimball Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (1972), and to a lesser extant the form suggest the barrel vaults designed by Harvard-based Walter Gropius and Sheldon Levitt for Temple Oheb Shalom in Baltimore in the 1960s. 

Cambridge, MA. Rosovsky Hall (Harvard Hillel). Moshe Safdie, arch., 1994. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2015

The semi-circular wall of steel columns that lines one side of the courtyard and faces Plympton Street, is also a striking feature. For much of the year the architecture is lost in the foliage, but now you can see the steel screen as an impressive colonnade in classical tradition - like that which surrounded the Emperor Hadrian island retreat at his Tivoli villa. But there is something in the design that recalls exposition or airport architecture, where the details of the engineering are part of the aesthetic.

 Cambridge, MA. Rosovsky Hall (Harvard Hillel). Moshe Safdie, arch., 1994. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2015

 Cambridge, MA. Rosovsky Hall (Harvard Hillel). Moshe Safdie, arch., 1994. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2015

This year I am going to keep my eyes open for other interesting Hillel houses.  If you see any, let me know.