At Harvard U., the Culprit Is Moisture, and the Cure Is Demolition

Harvard University’s big art-museum overhaul will entail demolishing Werner Otto Hall, an addition to the Fogg Art Museum that’s only 17 years old—and that was designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects, one of the most prominent firms in business today. Now Robert Campbell, the architecture critic for The Boston Globe, has written a fascinating article about Werner Otto Hall for Architectural Record. He says the addition’s problem isn’t that it no longer meets the museum’s needs—the problem is that its walls have rotted from the inside.

Moisture is to blame—but so is a lack of communication between the addition’s designers and the people they were designing it for, Mr. Campbell says. The museum curators wanted galleries that could be kept at 70 degrees and 50 percent humidity, and wanted them pressurized as well, so that air would always be blowing out of them, instead of being blown in. But the museum was “making demands that neither the world of architects nor the world of engineers and contractors had quite caught up with” when the building was designed, he writes.

What happened next is still open to debate. It was the subject of litigation in 1996, when the university sued the architects and the contractors, and neither side will say much now. What Mr. Campbell concludes, though, is that in winter the warm, humid air was forced through a vapor barrier and into the addition’s walls, where the water in it condensed and the rot began. Whether the barrier was poorly designed or was compromised after construction remains unclear, but the rot was unmistakable.

Architects today are more sophisticated about designing walls for high-tech projects, according to an engineer Mr. Campbell talked to. That sophistication, however, has come too late for Harvard, which concluded that the cheapest fix for the museum addition is demolition. Renzo Piano Building Workshop and Payette are in charge of the renovations to the complex, which the university expects will take about five years.