Botanic Garden Apartments

INTRODUCTION
The masterplan for the renovation of the Harvard Botanic Garden - Apartments is the result of the efforts of Douglas Okun Associates, with consultant services from Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates and Clifford Selbert Design. This plan includes a comprehensive evaluation of the assets and liabilities of the site, buildings and amenities, and provides a phased strategy for renovation.


Comprehensive drawings and cost estimates are presented to help visually communicate the masterplan approach. We have achieved a design solution for the Botanic Garden Apartments that best meets the needs and demands of Harvard Real Estate.


Designed immediately after World War II as veteran's housing, Botanic Gardens represents typical post-war architecture. The "house in the garden" ideal that utopian planners envisioned for the site has since eroded, leaving bethink a site with an institutional character.


This masterplan for the Botanic Garden Apartments sets out to accomplish the following:


  1. Improve existing living spaces to provide more attractive housing for Harvard faculty, including junior faculty;
  2. Supply new housing to satisfy the acute need in the Harvard community;
  3. Address the growing urgency for a daycare facility by Harvard affiliated families in the area;
  4. Restore the site to its historic significance with a botanical emphasis on small flowering trees;
  5. Improve site amenities and create a strong site and building identity through a consistent system of site graphics, lighting, and furniture;
  6. Improve Fernald and Robinson Drives with new curbs, sidewalks, and street trees.

Phase I focuses on the immediate needs of the existing conditions and includes the interior renovations of the apartments and entry stairwells. Code requirements mandate the conversion of seven units to be fully accessible by the disabled. These items, along with the initiation of the landscape and graphics systems, begin the strategy of implementing the masterplan.


Phase II focuses on the new constructions proposed by this masterplan and includes a new daycare, 16 units of new housing and an efficient strategy for accommodating additional parking.


Phase III is the final step in the implementation strategy of this masterplan. With all of the proposed building construction and renovation previously completed this phase anchors the overall masterplan with the graphic design and landscape design systems. Included is the road and sidewalk work on Fernald and Robinson Streets, the introduction of landscape elements, and the lighting and signage systems that will unify the entire site.


HISTORY
The Botanic Garden, on the corner of Garden and Linnaean Streets, was opened in 1807 as part of Harvard's science department. Its first structure, Garden House, built in 1810, became Professor Asa Gray's residence in 1842. A preeminent botanist, Gray was a proponent of genetic connection in plant species and authored the "School and Field Guide to Botany." The site subsequently developed into a center for research and instruction which housed a herbarium, laboratories, an auditorium, and a library.


In 1872, while a student at Boston English High School, young Louis Sullivan, the architect, was introduced to the study of botany by visiting lecturer, Asa Gray. His "School and Field Guide to Botany" became Sullivan's constant companion." Sullivan's statement that, "the correlation of geometry and the organic was the basis of nature's method of composition"' was based on readings on plant morphology and biological growth by Gray. Gray's influence, coupled with the popular transcendentalist theories espoused by Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, had a strong impact on Sullivan. The design of Sullivan's buildings conveyed an intimate bond with nature, and his architectural style became the seed which generated the growth of Frank Lloyd Wright's work as well as what was to become American modern architecture.


By the 1920's their contributions to American architecture and Gray's advances in the field of botany were well recognized. The Harvard Botanic Gardens had initiated a research program on the most extensive collection of herbs, perennials, annuals, and ferns in this country. Due to the cost of this endeavor, the research was discontinued and by the 1940's, the Garden itself had become overgrown. In 1947, the City of Cambridge attempted to claim the. site by eminent domain, which caused Harvard to build the apartments that currently occupy the site.


Sherman, Paul; Louis Sullivan An Architect in American Thought, Prentice Hall, Inc. 1962.