When a wave of political revolutions effectively ended many of his urban design commissions in Latin America, the scale of Sert’s projects would diminish while retaining their grand social aims. With the construction of the Holyoke Center in 1958, Sert would unofficially assume the role of the University’s architect. His most visible commission at Harvard, the massive Science Center, completed in 1973, would remain Harvard’s largest building until the opening of the Medical School’s New Research Building just last month.

Amid the student protests and social idealism of the sixties, avant-garde architects such as Sert saw the opportunity to use the University as a living laboratory. The most visible of these projects, a darling of Modernist architects, was an approach to building with pre-fabricated components. The modular concrete panels and brightly colored brise-soleil baffles of the Holyoke Center are indicative of Sert’s larger social goals of implementing low-cost building techniques for housing.

“[The 60s] was a period in which there was much less resistance to Modern architecture,” says Daniels of the “golden age” of architecture in Cambridge.

Not all of Harvard had the Modernist bug. The Crimson published editorials blasting the new Holyoke Center. Riverside residents later decried a “lack of sunlight” due to the Peabody towers. To an extent, the success of a work of architecture can be gauged by the strength of opinions it evokes—positive and negative. For many, Sert’s buildings are distinctly urban, Modernist and concrete and recall images of brutalist “Soviet bloc” housing. Indeed, Sert’s Harvard projects were too cosmopolitan for Cambridge in the 1950s and 60s—and probably still are today.

Putting aesthetics aside, even Daniels agrees that Sert’s buildings, with their use of concrete and large plazas, are “absolutely unfit for New England weather conditions.”

In the end, Sert’s influence on the practice of architecture is difficult to measure. Like many architects, little has been written on his life and work. This is a shame, for Sert’s work is, at first sight, aesthetically difficult to understand half a century later.

The two exhibits provide little general background for the lay viewer. Even though the descriptions of each project are clear and articulate, they assume a basic knowledge of these projects’ historical and architectural context.

With no fewer than 275 objects on display, this is one of the most comprehensive and important exhibitions on Modern architecture Boston has seen in the past few years. For a Harvard audience that is intimately familiar with much of Sert’s work, presenting these buildings anew is not easy. While the exhibitions are somewhat traditional in approach, the objects are varied in type (from tiny sketches to large-scale blueprints) and quite handsomely displayed. In the Gund Hall gallery, the curators make good use of a difficult space in which to present an historical narrative.

As an architect, Sert proves to be difficult to locate: his dogmatic, CIAM-influenced urban planning seems antithetical to his interest in integrating the arts with architecture. While CIAM projects were ultimately the sites for murals and public sculpture, there is little exploration of this theme in the two exhibits.

Indeed, one of the treats of the exhibition is Sert’s personal art collection on view at the Carpenter Center exhibit. Works by his friends Miró, Calder, Léger and Nicola provide a fascinating way to understanding Sert’s own 60s-era aesthetic.

But the artworks are displayed separately from photographs and plans of Sert’s own house, which are on view at the design school. For an architect so interested in synthesizing the plastic arts with architecture and urban design—especially within his own home—this curatorial move is a bit puzzling.

Sert’s Legacy

In reassessing Sert’s importance in architecture and urban design, his legacy may not lie in developing a widely-appealing aesthetic, but in an ability to conceive and execute such ambitious buildings.

Sert’s architecture helped to inaugurate a new age for Harvard. Buildings such as Peabody Terrace and the Holyoke Center were a radical departure from Harvard’s 300-year-long obsession with red-brick.

As institutional trophies, Sert’s buildings proclaimed Harvard’s modernization to the world. After all, it took a great university to build great monuments to education.