Building Technology
Faithful Facelift
By Joann Gonchar, FAIA
PHOTOGRAPHY: © Historic New England, Steve Rosenthal
Collection of Commissioned Work
Gund Hall, the home of Harvard’s GSD, gets a new and improved skin, true to the original design intent.
The conservation of Modernist buildings from the middle of the last century presents a special set of challenges. Many were constructed with experimental materials and systems that are now failing and no longer available or have fallen out of favor. They were built in an age of inexpensive energy and global-warming naivete, often requiring huge quantities of natural resources to heat and cool. How can such buildings be preserved in a way that enhances their performance and sustainability while maintaining their essential character? Gund Hall, home of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), on the university’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus, provides an example. The late-modernist structure, designed by Australian architect John Andrews (a GSD alumnus) and completed in 1972, is a composition in exposed poured-in-place concrete and steel. At its core is a dramatic open volume housing four terraced studio “trays” sheltered below a stepped roof supported on a series of 125-foot-long sloping tubular trusses. Remaining program elements, including an auditorium, library, faculty offices, and classrooms, are tucked below the trays or partially wrap them. Glass—as one would expect with a building designed before the 1973 oil embargo—is an essential feature, especially for the studio expanse, which has east-facing clerestory windows incorporated into the cascading roof, and gridded glazed facades on the north and south. Sarah M. Whiting, GSD dean, describes Gund as “a unique building that was at once solid and transparent and that prioritized the student body, united within an enormous, light-filled, single space.”
Room and Board
By Vernon Mays
Photography by Alan Karchmer
A southern wall was lowered to introduce more daylight into the inner courtyard.
VMDO Architects overhauls a century-old dormitory, readying it for the next hundred years
For students at The George Washington University (GW), living in Thurston Hall was a formative experience—described by some as having a feeling of solidarity earned through mutual hardship. For, while the nine-story brick dormitory had long cast a monumental presence on F Street in Washington, D.C., “the building set up a promise that it didn’t deliver in the inside,” says Joe Atkins, principal at VMDO Architects of Charlottesville, Virginia, which completed a transformative renovation of the building in 2022.
Indeed, by almost any standard, the interiors were dismal. Nearly 1,100 freshmen were shoehorned into suites designed for four people but housing as many as six. Cramped, windowless corridors encircling the building were a wayfinding challenge. And the central lightwell—the only view available to half the residents—was dark, dank, and inaccessible.
Given those conditions, demolition might have been an option. But “we were not able to tear Thurston down,” says Adam Aaronson, assistant vice president for construction management and campus planning at GW. “It is located within GW’s Historic District and therefore needed to remain.”
Instead, the university moved forward with a gut renovation of the building, staging an invited competition that VMDO won. The firm’s inspired central idea was to carve away portions of five floors on the building’s south side, vastly increasing sunlight penetration into the lightwell. In addition, they reimagined the dreary lightwell as a dynamic urban living room—a center of social activity with a landscaped plaza, raised patio, and seventh-floor terrace that invites students to mingle.