Links
Archives
Friday, December 24, 2004
|
HARVARD
UD sits in her small Cambridge hotel's lobby late at night, checking the news online while a few steps away from her, at the front desk, the night clerk gently snores. As usual, the weather around Harvard Square is wretched -- high winds and rain -- but earlier in the day it wasn't so bad, and UD and her daughter checked out the tilted Graduate School of Design Building, the circular Le Corbusier Carpenter Center, and then the quads, full of Asian families taking pictures of themselves in front of Widener Library. For UD, Harvard has always had a disappointing prestige-to-ambiance ratio. Unlike Stanford, for instance, which really wows you, Harvard's physical actuality seems incapable of keeping up with its immense international aura. Its series of quadlets, each rounded or squared with arbitrarily thrown together, conventional buildings, fails to add up to HARVARD. "They filmed 'Legally Blonde' here!" UD's daughter enthused as they entered the largest of the quads. Then she shrugged. "Looked more interesting in the movie..." |