Harvard Union, Boston: architect, style and history

Harvard Union, now the Barker Center, went up in 1900 at Quincy and Harvard Streets in Cambridge — the first Harvard commission for the firm McKim, Mead & White. Henry Lee Higginson, the same donor who paid for Soldiers Field, gave the money to create a club any student could join for ten dollars a year, meant to give the university's many undergraduates left out of the exclusive final clubs a social space of their own.

the building

English-flavored Georgian. The 2-1/2 story brick building reads as neo-Georgian, but its styling leans closer to English Georgian precedent than to the colonial American Georgian more common on this side of the Atlantic. It was enlarged in 1911, to a design by Thomas Mott Shaw, to add the Varsity Club.

the style

Cataloged as Colonial Revival, though the building's Georgian detailing is pointedly English rather than the homegrown colonial American strain the term usually implies — an unusual note for a Harvard building of this period.

the architect

McKim, Mead & White took on Harvard Union as their first job on the Harvard campus, a foothold that led to further work for the university.

significance

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The building's original mission — a big-tent social club for students shut out of Harvard's final clubs — gave way over time to its current life as the Barker Center for the Humanities.

nearby

Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts 250 ft · Brutalism
Old Cambridge Baptist Church 410 ft · Gothic Revival · 1867
Fogg Museum 0.1 mi · Colonial Revival · 1896
Harvard Art Museums 0.1 mi · 1895
Sever Hall 0.1 mi · Romanesque Revival
Harvard Lampoon Building 0.1 mi

All 282 buildings in Boston