Peabody Terrace, on the north bank of the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a Harvard University housing complex primarily serving graduate students, particularly married students and their families.
Designed in the brutalist style[1] and constructed in 1964, its three-story perimeter grows to five and seven stories within, with three interior 22-story towers.[2]
It has been described as "beloved by architects and disliked by almost everyone else."[3]
Description
Peabody Terrace was completed in 1965 at a cost of $8.5million.[2] On 5.9 acres (2.4 ha), the 650,000-square-foot (60,000 m2) complex consists of about 500 apartments (a mixture of "efficiencies" and one-, two-, and three-bedroom units—all with 7-foot-6-inch (2.3 m) ceilings) plus playgrounds, nurseries, roof terraces, laundromats/laundry rooms, meetings/seminar rooms, study rooms, and a parking garage.[2] In order to maximize usable floor space and speed vertical transportation, the towers' elevators stop on every third floor.[4] The Harvard-affiliated Peabody Terrace Children's Center is housed on the complex grounds.
Originally designated as housing for married students, the partially completed project appeared in a Harvard Crimson photo over the caption, "University Moves to Thwart Early Marriages", and the Crimson later called it "well on the way to being just as hideous" as another Sert-designed building, Harvard's new administrative high-rise Holyoke Center.[6] Nonetheless it received the Boston Society of Architects' Harleston Parker Medal and the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal.[2]
In 1965 Progressive Architecture said Sert had achieved "an efficiently workable interior arrangement, a lively sequence of exterior spaces, and a fluent continuity from low to high, and from old to new structures."[7] But by 1994 the same publication saw Peabody Terrace as "an embarrassment to Harvard, and the last resort of graduate students who couldn’t find a better place to live."[8] (The living units were renovated between 1993 and 1995 and the common areas overhauled in 2013.[4])
^ Campbell, Robert (Summer 2004). "Why Don't the Rest of Us Like the Buildings the Architects Like?". Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences: 22.