William James Hall
- Architect
- Minoru Yamasaki
- City
- Boston, MA
William James Hall has stood 15 stories and 215 feet over Harvard's campus since 1963, among the tallest buildings the university has ever built. Minoru Yamasaki designed it in the New Formalism style he made his signature, on the site of Randall Hall, torn down to make room for it. It's named for William James, the philosopher-psychologist who helped establish Harvard's Psychology department.
the building
Built for Social Relations. The hall was raised to house Harvard's Department of Social Relations, a mid-century experiment merging anthropology, psychology, and sociology under one roof and chaired for decades by sociologist Talcott Parsons; the department became notorious for unethical human experimentation before its programs were absorbed back into Psychology, Sociology, and Social Studies.
the style
Yamasaki designed William James Hall in New Formalism — a style built on symmetry, applied ornament, and a monumental, almost temple-like verticality — here stretched over fifteen office-tower stories.
the architect
Minoru Yamasaki built William James Hall in 1963, in the same New Formalism idiom as his Robertson Hall at Princeton; a decade later his design for the World Trade Center in New York would become his best-known work.
nearby
- Luther Brooks House
- Church of the New Jerusalem
- Memorial Hall
- Harvard Art Museums
- Fogg Museum
- Sever Hall