Behnisch Architects’ Green Design for Harvard

A Boston Globe article says Harvard has hired a leading green-architecture firm to design its science campus. Behnisch Architects held an exhibition with the university to show off some of the qualities they hope to incorporate into the new Allston Campus.

“Here they talk about all the qualities of architecture that have nothing to do with the fashionable shape-making we too often get from celebrity architects,” writes Robert Campbell, the Globe’s architecture critic. “They talk about what makes a building pleasant for human beings, qualities like air, light, sound, and human scale, but also, less predictably, things like density and ‘enough complexity and mystery.’”

Mr. Campbell finds it interesting that density is one of the virtues cited: “Only a few years ago, ‘density’ was bad. People endlessly recycled ancient lore about laboratory rats being driven crazy from crowding. But with the revival of interest in city life, a movement that goes back at least to the great urbanist Jane Jacobs in the early 1960s, ‘density’ is becoming a plus word. Densely built environments, it is now recognized, need less energy. Manhattan, for example, is, by far, the greenest community in the United States, as measured by the amount of energy used per household or per capita.”