Top: Harvard Square. Bottom: Inside Gund Hall

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Photos by David Brussat

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

THE LINCOLN INSTITUTE of Land Policy here hosted a conference for journalists about cities and climate change on April 10-11. While rare and hence commendable nods were made by some speakers toward the complexity of climate science, skeptics of global warming, whose optimism might have lightened the mood, were not given equal billing. This was predictable, but it hardly diminished the pleasure of seeing Cambridge again.

I hadn’t been to Cambridge for at least half a decade. The survival of its aesthetic allure in the face of a national building boom was a surprise. The shopping experience of Harvard Square increasingly resembles that of every place in brand-name America, but most of it remains housed in buildings new and old that defer to the lovely organic Georgian classicism of Harvard’s academic quadrangles.

The Lincoln Institute was joined in its sponsorship of the Journalists’ Forum on Climate Change and Cities by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). The first day was at the institute’s gracious Lincoln House (built in 1887) on Brattle Street, a red Colonial Revival with twin gables next to the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow House. The second day was at the GSD’s Gund Hall (1972), a Brutalist horror show blessedly outside the main campus, and reminiscent of the Yale Art & Architecture Building (1963), which students dissatisfied with its design allegedly attempted to torch in 1969.

Modern architecture was foisted on America largely by the GSD. For classicists like me, Gund is the belly of the beast. Its design makes it easy for proctors to look out for any young firebrands. Students work in hundreds of cubicles, rows of which step upward on concrete “trays” beneath an up-stepping ceiling of glass risers and steel treads. During lunch, I myself spied on the students, searching up and down each tray for a contrarian project, anything not predictably modernist. Surprise! I found one. It was a balsa-wood model of a Colonial-era house.

Fortunately, although it has birthed generations of bad architects, Gund Hall did not itself multiply like rabbits, and certainly not within Harvard Yard. Fondness of memory plays a large part in building a university endowment. Academic quadrangles that look like academic quadrangles are essential. Harvard knows how to keep those alumni dollars rolling in. It has a lesson for Brown University, which recently announced plans to tear down three historic houses (if no one volunteers to move them) to make way for a brain-science center. No-brainer alert!

The wealthy Harvard professoriate that populates the fine old houses near Harvard Square probably would not put up with any such assault by the university on the elegance of its neighborhood. Cambridge may have the NIMBYest NIMBYs this side of Cape Cod. Alas, College Hill’s NIMBYs are pikers, and its preservationists have in recent decades all but surrendered to the almighty Brown.

Architects and architecture professors tend to live in lovely old houses. No doubt as they apply their “At least the war on the environment is going well” bumper stickers to their hybrids, they tremble at the architecture arising to meet the challenge of climate change. It looks as if green architecture will cut our carbon footprints by hiking the tax modernism imposes on our aesthetic environment.

The PowerPoint presentations I saw, on the rare occasions when they descended to my streetscape level of interest, only stoked my concern that cities’ response to climate change will be to make the same mistakes urban renewal (“urban removal”) made in the 1950s and 1960s. The poor were stuffed into public-housing monoliths that reflected the brutally inhumane modernist idealism of that era. A similar sterility of design inflicted on American downtowns further fueled middle-class flight to the suburbs.

Today, in the name of green, enlightened architects and planners seek to force an updated version of modernist sterility and egoism on us again.

Speakers at the conference described hopeful efforts to entice Americans out of their cars and their suburbs through new green planning and certification that encourage living at higher densities along transit corridors. Regardless of global warming we must cut energy use, but doing so will be harder if the strategy includes ramming ugly buildings down our throats. Try beauty. It goes down easier.

As Roger Scruton argues in the latest City Journal: “Deep within everyone’s psyche, forming the measure of expectations and the image of settlement, is an idea of home, of the somewhere that is not just yours or mine but ours. We need to reawaken this archetype, which modernists’ policies have encouraged us to put out of our minds.”

How true. And in that archetype is the true green, forged before our plug-in society gave us the carbon footprint of a Goliath. Sadly, to judge by the conference of journalists in Cambridge, few of those thinking or writing about greening our cities seem willing to open their minds to that possibility.

David Brussat is a member of The Journal’s editorial board ( dbrussat@projo.com).