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On a narrow side street just outside Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a dozen officers of a community-based organization are sitting in a living room and passing judgment on some of the world's leading architects. While these self-appointed design commissars sip Chardonnay and nibble on homemade chocolate chip cookies, Harvard University officials, hoping to win their approval, are presenting plans by architects such as Renzo Piano and Hans Hollein.

The stakes are high: the 800-member Harvard Square Defense Fund does not hand out prizes, but its judgments have consequences. A thumbs-down from the group can result in expensive modifications, interminable lawsuits, or even doom a project to failure. The community activists who started it played a leading role in quashing plans to build the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library in Cambridge along the banks of the Charles River. I. M. Pei's glass pyramid, which was to grace the complex, ended up at the Louvre, and the library was sent to a less prestigious address: South Boston.

The Defense Fund's officers include Crosby Forbes, a courtly retired museum curator; Pebble Gifford, an attractive, hard-driving Cambridge real estate agent; and Priscilla McMillan, a prominent journalist. They share an appetite for the mind-numbing details of land-use policy as well as an intense passion to preserve their city, which boasts some of the most historic neighborhoods in the country. And as Harvard embarks on its biggest expansion in several decades, university officials aren't taking any chances. They are soliciting the Defense Fund's input on every aspect of the design process, from a building's size and shape to the materials used in its construction.

Scott Levitan, Harvard's director of university and commercial real estate, explains to the Defense Fund that the university has ended its flirtation with postmodern architecture. In the past few decades, he says, Harvard's attempt to ameliorate its impact on local communities has resulted in a number of redbrick buildings with white trim, a design that mimics the neo-Georgian heritage of Harvard's primarily eighteenth- and nineteenth-century campus. But after several decades of historicist buildings, critics have come to see them as actually cheapening the originals they were meant to emulate. Harvard has now entered a new era, Levitan says. The university has hired architects from around the world, including Pritzker Prize winners Hollein and Piano, to design signature buildings that are modern but will respect Cambridge's historic environs. "The purpose is to acknowledge Harvard's international scope," he says.

On the drawing boards is a proposal for a striking graduate dormitory complex adjacent to the low-scale contemporary Soldiers Field Apartments, which are part of Harvard Business School's mostly neo-Georgian campus in Allston, across the Charles River from Cambridge. With its extensive use of brick, the design by Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti pays homage to its neighbors. But the building's height and hard geometric shapes articulate a bold new statement; no quaint wrought-iron fences or white wooden cornices here. Suspended over the entrance to a vast courtyard is a large slab of the building, which juts out from a tall, sleek cast-stone-and-brick tower. Boston architecture critic and historian Douglas Shand-Tucci calls the design a masterpiece of "Modernist contextural architecture." The Harvard Square Defense Fund, however, is appalled by it.

Six stories have already been lopped from the original 21-story design in response to community pressures. But for Gifford the building is still too tall; she's concerned about the "canyonization" of the largely open skyline along the Charles River. Aside from a couple of controversial skyscrapers, Harvard's presence on both sides of the river has been defined predominantly by graceful spires and colored cupolas that turn a golden hue in the sunset. Set along the river is a picturesque greenbelt, a popular place for walkers, cyclists, and joggers. Serving as a backdrop, the university's architecture looks, from many viewpoints, like a scene from an English landscape by Constable.

"Cambridge is nothing without the Charles River," Gifford says, "and if you line it with high-rises, then we have lost something. Rome has the Tiber, Paris the Seine. They don't allow them to build high-rises along those rivers, so why should we allow them to on the Charles?"

The tension between the new global economy and local communities is being thrown into bold relief at the interstices of elite university campuses and urban neighborhoods. Increasingly, urban campuses are being built out, forcing universities to expand at their perimeters, where they meet their host communities. The resulting friction is fueling both aesthetic and social conflicts. Some of the most successful fund-raising campaigns in American university history are driving the building booms. Harvard's recent $2.6 billion capital campaign was the largest ever raised by a university until last month, when Columbia University surpassed it with $2.8 billion. Many of the new buildings in Cambridge will be made possible by the Harvard-minted winners in the new economy: Microsoft's Bill Gates, venture capitalist Sidney Knafel, and others. Harvard will use the capital to expand its educational programs and upgrade its technological infrastructure and the resulting construction boom will be one of the biggest in its history. In the next five years, Harvard officials estimate that they will spend more than $1 billion on construction projects in Boston and Cambridge.

University and college expansion has been "off the charts" in the past several years, says Ralph Gentile, senior economist at F.W. Dodge, a division of the McGraw-Hill Companies. "College construction has more than doubled since the mid-1980s," he says. "In dollar terms, it's on the order of a five-fold increase. And it doesn't necessarily look like we are at the peak." Among the universities enlarging their physical plants is Yale, which has released a $1.25 billion plan for new construction and renovation-the university's biggest expansion since the 1930s. Stanford is putting the finishing touches on a controversial ten-year master plan that will enlarge its campus by an estimated 25 percent. And Columbia and New York University are planning major construction. "Research universities in particular have become some of the principal economic engines in the new economy," says Paul Grogan, Harvard's vice president for government, community, and public affairs, and author of Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival. "Because of their research activities, they have become a magnet for new types of companies," he says, noting that high-tech, bio-tech, and venture-capital firms feed off the discoveries made at universities like Harvard.

In Cambridge, university-related growth is providing jobs for highly skilled workers and improving the tax base-but it is also helping to kill the city's diversity, contends Cambridge's former mayor, Francis Duehay, a Harvard graduate and former faculty member. "Housing has become so expensive as a result of all this economic activity, which they [Harvard and nearby MIT] have been the single most important factor in generating," Duehay says. "People of more modest means-people who couldn't keep up with this new economy-have been or are being forced out of the city." Ironically, this includes students. In the last three years, the number of Harvard graduate students living off campus in Cambridge has dropped from more than 3,300 to 1,600 because of escalating housing costs.

The university's building boom is serving as the lightning rod for discontent. "Harvard is a real estate corporation that offers a few courses to justify its tax-exemption status," says McMillan, a vice president of the Defense Fund and an associate at Harvard's Davis Center for Russian Studies. McMillan's tongue-in-cheek appraisal is not outlandish in the current climate. In 1997 the university revealed that over a ten-year period it had used a straw corporation to conceal its identity and buy 52 acres of property in Allston. And rumors abound that the school is clandestinely buying up Cambridge real estate and making secret plans for the city's future. This past fall Cambridge city councilors asked for and received for the first time a list of properties that Harvard had bought in Cambridge in the last decade. The city council also demanded that the university provide a master plan indicating what further development plans Harvard has. Although school officials provided a list of projects currently in planning stages, they would not commit to supplying a master plan.

It hasn't escaped the university's notice that many in Cambridge view the institution as they would an 800-pound gorilla. As a nonprofit entity Harvard is not required to pay taxes on property it uses for academic purposes, but it does make a payment in lieu of taxes. And in the past several years the school has made a major effort to burnish its image. Recently, Harvard mailed out glossy booklets publicizing the cultural and academic resources it makes open to the public. In 1999 it released a 70-page report touting an estimated $2 billion in economic benefits to the Boston metropolitan area. That same year Harvard also launched an unprecedented affordable-housing initiative for nonstudent housing in Boston and Cambridge, which included $20 million in low-interest loans. "Many companies don't have the allegiance to place that universities have," says Harvard's Grogan, "and that's magnifying the importance of universities, not only as economic players but as civic players from which a lot will be expected."



This new civic responsiveness is having a major impact on what universities are building. While Harvard is hiring the world's leading architects to design bold new buildings, it's also listening to anyone who walks off the street into one of the many community meetings being held to discuss its projects. Meetings at the Cambridge Senior Center, which can last from four to five hours, have resulted in changes to the windows, the sidewalks, and even the height and shape of the new Knafel Center for Government and International Studies, by Henry Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners.

Cobb praises the university for reaching out to the community. "I don't think any commercial developer would have patience for the process," he says. That process has dragged on for more than three years while the total price of the new center has more than tripled from initial cost estimates of $30 million. In response to community input, Cobb has moved the center to save a popular neighborhood green space and drawn up several major changes of plan. The design as it currently stands features two four-story buildings with subdued, salmon-colored tile bases that respect the neighborhood's street wall and accent the adjacent brick buildings. The tops of the buildings are uncompromisingly modern with dramatic curvilinear glass sections. "Harvard has to live with the consequences of its decisions, whereas a commercial developer can just move on," Cobb says. "I think there's a certain social credibility that this project has acquired as a result of going through this process. If it hasn't acquired that credibility, then I will have wasted several years of my life."

Despite Cobb's efforts, neighbors remain adamantly opposed to the project. "It's seen as a statement of intent to take over the neighborhood," says John Pitkin, president of the Mid-Cambridge Neighborhood Association. "With one or two exceptions, every neighbor that has spoken out at the public hearings has been in opposition, both because of the use and activity and also because of the architectural context." He sees the new structures as clashing with the brick apartment buildings and elegant nineteenth-century Greek Revival frame houses in his neighborhood.

In addition to being an aesthetic disruption, the new development will bring more traffic congestion, Pitkin maintains. Certainly the new buildings will increase the university's presence, placing the center for one of its most popular majors, government, at the edge of one of the most historic residential neighborhoods in Cambridge. It is a place where one can walk the quiet tree-lined side streets and sense the ghosts of famous former residents such as E. E. Cummings and William James. In addition to faculty offices there will be classrooms, a library, computer facilities, and a student Cafe. Many are worried that the new center, which lies only a few blocks away from Harvard's main campus, is a prelude to further development in their neighborhood. "The people that live across the street from the Knafel Center have made a considerable investment in their property," Pitkin says. "They want to know: Is this the beginning or the end?"

University expansion has a volatile history. Three decades ago an attempt by Columbia University to build a new gym for both students and community residents in Harlem's Morningside Park was seen as a land-grab and served as the spark for the 1968 student riots. In 1970 residents of Cambridge's Riverside neighborhood stormed Harvard's commencement and took over the mike to protest university development.

Construction by Harvard during the 1960s turned Riverside's name into a misnomer. The neighborhood was once bounded by the Charles River, but that changed when Harvard built Peabody Terrace, a hulking three-tower concrete high-rise. Considered the masterpiece of architect Josep Lluis Sert, it swallowed up city streets, obstructed views and access to the river, and loomed over the surrounding two- and three-story clapboard houses. While the Lego-like complex-with its busy assortment of balconies, colors, and differently scaled buildings-won accolades from architects, its beauty was lost on many residents of Riverside, a blue-collar neighborhood with roots going back more than 150 years. "These are residents who grew up in a Cambridge neighborhood; now they feel like they are living on Harvard's campus," says Cambridge city councilor Marjorie Decker.

Now Harvard intends to build two world-class museums by Renzo Piano on the remaining waterfront property it owns in Riverside. The plan is encountering stiff resistance from residents such as Saundra Graham, a state representative and neighborhood activist who blames the university for the rapid gentrification taking place in her community. "They just come in and wipe you out, and they expect you to just go away because they have money and power," she says. Although the museums-only a few stories tall and concealed behind a canopy of trees-won't be physically intrusive, neighbors have signed a petition seeking a moratorium on all development in the area for a year and a half. In part, the residents' animus is fueled by their experience with Peabody Terrace. While university officials emphasize that the museum would be open to the public, many Cambridge residents are not mollified. The new museum complex would replace a popular garden center, a tax-paying business, with a nonprofit one. "As a resident of the world, maybe I would like a museum," says Duehay, "but as a resident of Cambridge, maybe I prefer the garden center."

Cambridge's newly elected mayor, Anthony Galluccio, suggests that if the university had cultivated a more symbiotic relationship with the community, it might be having better luck with its building projects. He also gives the university low marks for not paying its workers a living wage-an issue that resulted in a demonstration last May that drew students, unions, the mayor, and celebrities such as Ben Affleck. "Take the image of the abutter who wants to put a third story on his/her residential house," Galluccio says. "If that person has been a good neighbor for the past 30 years, you would tend to support that expansion even though you think it's a little too big for the neighborhood. But when Harvard enters into a development process, the question that gets asked is: Has Harvard been a good neighbor?"

Whether neighborhood groups will eventually derail Harvard's development plans remains to be seen. However, for Cobb the university has no option but to acknowledge community input. "At this point in the evolution of our democracy, power has been very broadly distributed, so that no issue can be resolved without many voices being heard," Cobb says. "This is a reality, and although it may be costly and burdensome, it is in the end a far better reality than having decisions made by flat." However, he also warns that if there is no compromise, the whole process can result in "cultural paralysis."

In Cambridge the process might not be paralyzed, but it has slowed to a crawl. Cobb's design for the Knafel Center is still under assault by neighbors who will undoubtedly extend an already lengthy land-review process. The Cambridge City Council has approved a petition to put an 18-month moratorium on development in the Riverside neighborhood, halting progress on Piano's museums. And community groups remain determined to knock more stories off Machado and Silvetti's graduate dormitory.

Harvard officials indicate that they don't have an endless reserve of patience or money. "As long as neighborhood groups and Harvard are equally committed to projects moving forward, community dialogue can work," says Harvard's senior director of community relations, Mary Power. "But you can get to a point where the discussion is not about finding mutually agreeable solutions. The discussion can be about stopping projects."

For some critics the new level of community input has already damaged the quality of the aesthetic statement that Harvard is trying to make. The shortening of Machado and Silvetti's dormitory is a desecration, says architecture critic Shand-Tucci, who included the original design in his book Built in Boston: City and Suburb 1800-2000. "I cannot build it," he says, "but I can ensure that no one forgets it."

Shand-Tucci, who recently finished writing Harvard University: An Architectural Tour, says community groups are threatening the very spirit of the urban environment, which is the juxtaposition of buildings of varying scale and style. He goes on to say that the vitality of a community depends more on land use than on built forms. If community groups want to retain their neighborhoods, he says, they should leave new buildings alone and limit their activism to preserving distinctive historic structures and cherished businesses. In the case of a historic area, such as Harvard Square, "You won't preserve it by wrapping it in cellophane and phony redbrick buildings," he says.

But for preservationists such as Frank E. Sanchis III, the executive director of the Municipal Art Society, a civic organization in New York City, a new building can destroy a neighborhood's character. Sanchis is fighting what he calls out-of-scale development by New York University in historic Greenwich Village. "When you get into the issue of constructing a new building out of contemporary materials in a district of old buildings," he says, "the only way you are going to achieve compatibility is through appropriate size, appropriate bulk, and appropriate scale. And by respecting the morphography of the area-the relationship to the street, the relationship to the surrounding buildings."

For many in Cambridge, Harvard's international architectural statements are not simply aesthetic dislocations-they are also emblematic of the dislocating force the university has become in their city. "The thing that really troubles me is if you look at what Cambridge once was, as recently as the 1950s, there was a balance between the residential and the academic," says Defense Fund vice president Forbes, who obtained his doctorate in history from the university, studying seventeenth-century religious dissent. "But since the 1960s the balance has shifted. The big sword of Damocles hanging over the future is: Where is it going to stop? What further imbalance is going to be created because of Harvard's future needs?"