As the architect of many of Harvard’s most monumental and prominent buildings, Josep Lluís Sert remains controversial even 20 years after his death.

Around Cambridge, Sert’s use of beton brut—French for “raw concrete”—and his unmistakable Modernist style continue to raise the ire of the red-brick-and-ivy set, as many of his projects did when they were first built. The designer of Peabody Terrace, the Holyoke Center, the Science Center and the Carpenter Center (with Le Corbusier as lead designer), Sert occupies the role of Harvard’s most influential architect.

The organizers of “Josep Lluís Sert: The Architect of Urban Design, 1953-1969” and “Josep Lluís Sert: Architect to the Arts II,” concurrent exhibitions now on display in Gund Hall and the Carpenter Center’s Sert Gallery, believe that Sert’s overall influence on the shaping of urban design is greater than the sum of his individual Harvard commissions.

“There’s a reliability in his work, which is not a very glamorous adjective,” says Mary Daniels, curator of the retrospective with Inés Zalduendo. In addition to his work as an architect, Sert was also an educational innovator, creating the first formal urban design program while dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) during the 1950s and 60s.

Though Sert’s work has been largely neglected, contemporary issues both at Harvard and abroad make this current retrospective timely. Recent attention to the physical reconstruction of Kabul and Baghdad by urban planners, as well as the ongoing row over Harvard’s development plans in Riverside neighborhood, near Peabody Terrace, are illuminated by the exhibitions.

Émigré to Architect

Born in 1902 to wealthy and well-connected Barcelona family—his uncle, Güell, was the patron of Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí—Sert would flee first from fascism in Spain and then again from Paris with the onset of World War II.

“He spanned a rotten century,” remarks Daniels.

Well-connected in Catalan intellectual circles, Sert’s first major commission was Spain’s pavilion at the 1937 International Exposition in Paris. “As the product of a nation at war with itself it is a miracle,” the Carpenter Center display quotes one publication as saying at the time of the building’s inauguration. As a piece of architecture, it was a mild success. At the end of the Exposition, Sert’s design would largely go forgotten, its fame overshadowed by the mural it housed—Picasso’s famous “Guernica.”

An active member of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM)—an informal, avant-garde association of European architects—Sert became involved in an international effort to strengthen urban centers in the face of a trend towards the abandoning of urban cores. This was seen as a problem both in Europe after the physical devastation of World War II and in the U.S. with ever increasing suburbanization due to the automobile. The group sought to create “new ‘hearts of the city’ that would become unique centers of collective vitality,” says Daniels. The CIAM plazas, high-rise housing, pedestrian paths and recreational spaces would become important and recurring elements in Sert’s own work.

The need for a new discipline to address the physical dimension of rebuilding post-WWII urban centers brought about the first formal program in urban design at Harvard, and Sert was brought in by the dean of design school. In his time at the Graduate School of Design Sert would create an interdisciplinary program to combine cultural and aesthetic concerns with politics and civil engineering. He would also use his own practice—projects he did for the governments of Cuba, Colombia and Brazil—to provide a model for an emerging field. Professionally and pedagogically, Sert was in the right place at the right time.

“This was the period when there was actually federal and governmental money available for urban renewal,” adds Daniels. “He arrived when there was bankrolling available for ambitious schemes.”

While completing some of the largest design commissions of the time, Sert was also a professor and administrator back in Cambridge. Later, when Sert assumed the deanship, the Design School’s students and faculty doubled in number. He would also initiate a move from the Neoclassical Robinson Hall, located in the Yard, to a proposed Modern building to be constructed across the street from Memorial Hall.

Sert and the University

“Boston has to change with the times,” Sert said in a 1964 Boston Globe article. And he was going to change it—beginning with Harvard.