Harvard was busy this summer altering its skyline to provide for expansion of its affiliated housing, art collection and hotel rooms in the Square.

Students fresh from summer vacation will find a campus consumed by the dulcet tones of jackhammers, backhoes and construction workers madly riveting girders.

It's all for a purpose though. By the end of 1991, the Fogg Art Museum will sport a new annex, a new affiliated housing development will grace DeWolfe St. and the east end of the Square will house a Harvard-owned hotel.

More Art

The ongoing construction on the Werner Otto Hall addition to the Fogg will again cause disturbances to the Fine Arts library, which last year had to relocate its circulation desk because of the construction.

"The library users have experienced the most disturbance. The daily construction noise is the loudest in there," said Marjorie B. Cohn, acting director of the Fogg.

Over the summer, progress was made on the exterior of the addition. It features pyramid-like skylights, porcelain tiles and limestone from Indiana.

The $7.5 million addition will provide a new home for the Busch-Reisinger Museum on the top floors and a new reading room for the Fine Arts Library on the ground level.

The outside should be completed by October, according to Brian Corkrim, who is supervising the project for Walsh Brothers Inc.

While asbestos removal from the points where the new addition connects with the Fogg temporarily slowed the work, it is now back on schedule, according to Harvard officials involved with the project.

The work is scheduled to be complete this spring, but art work will not be moved in until the fall to give the new building a chance to settle, Cohn said.

The addition's completed facade is in a strikingly different style than that of the Fogg museum itself, but according to Peter Nesbitt, curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, the new wing will blend well with the original.

"People can get a sense of the color relationships and the relationships between the materials on the two buildings," he said.

New Housing

Harvard's DeWolfe St. affiliated housing complex, which may house most of the College's transfer students, is scheduled to be completed by this coming May.