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Featured on the cover of RETROFIT‘s September/October issue is the newly-renovated Smith Campus Center at Harvard University.

In “Harvard University Updates a Brutalist Structure Into a Campus Center That Also Supports the Wider Community,” Bruner/Cott Principal Henry Moss, AIA, LEED AP, discusses the recent renovation of the Richard A. Susan F. Smith Campus Center.

“Designed as an administrative building by Josep Lluis Sert, dean of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, in 1958, Holyoke Center, a Brutalist building on Harvard Square, was completed in 1966. The 100-foot-tall concrete structure was a remarkable work of urban design for its time, proposing innovative street-level pedestrian space at its base. But as the seminal building approached its half-century mark, it had become unloved and well-worn during the passing years.

In 2013, seeking to realize its first-ever physical hub for students, faculty, staff, visitors and the Cambridge, Mass., community at large, university representatives decided to repurpose the lower floors of the building as the new Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Campus Center. Part of a multi-year effort to create and improve common spaces across Harvard to ensure its physical spaces would foster the intellectual, cultural and social experience, as well as support the wider community, the revived building was envisioned as the new meeting place of ‘town and gown.'”l-worn during the passing years.

Read the full RETROFIT article here.