The Making of a School
BRICK BY BRICK: Completion of the campus dormitories took place in sixteen months.
BAKER LIBRARY HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS
On a stroll through campus, it’s almost impossible to envision HBS without the iconic columns and bell tower of the Baker Library|Bloomberg Center or the solid, brick presence of Aldrich Hall, where many an MBA student has taken part in the give and take of a case discussion. A new Centennial year exhibit, “ ‘A Concrete Symbol’: The Building of Harvard Business School, 1908–1927,” goes back to the School’s early years to tell the story of how the campus that so many enjoy today was planned and constructed.
Students who like to lounge in an armchair at Spangler or work out at Shad might be interested to hear what life was like before a Soldiers Field campus existed. “You had to hurry, and you didn’t often stop to talk to people,” the exhibit quotes Professor Emeritus George Bates (MBA ’25). “We had one classroom on the top of the Peabody Museum, another in the basement of the Harvard Union, and another in the basement of Lawrence Hall, which had, as I recall, a dirt floor.” Dean Wallace Donham led efforts to change that experience and give students “the ordinary humanities of life.” In 1924, a $5 million fundraising campaign began for the construction of a campus on a new site across the Charles River.
LIFELINE: Heat and electricity traveled across the Charles River via pipes inside the newly constructed Weeks Bridge.
UNIVERSITY PLANNING OFFICE, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Bishop William Lawrence of Harvard University approached George F. Baker, chairman of the First National Bank of New York, to request a $1 million gift to the School. After a few months had passed, Baker famously told Lawrence, “I have lost interest in the idea of giving a million dollars. . . . And I don’t care to give a half a million, either. But if by giving five million dollars I could have the privilege of building the whole School, I should like to do it.”
The prominent New York firm of McKim, Mead & White, architects of Harvard Stadium, the Harvard Union, and the Boston Public Library, among other nearby landmarks, won the architectural competition with its overall design of Georgian-style structures. Charles Killam, a professor of architecture at Harvard, noted that the “compact, straightforward layout of the desired semi-domestic character” had universally appealed to the selection team.
On June 4, 1927, a reported 4,000 people attended the dedication, with speakers including Bishop William Lawrence, former Dean Edwin Gay, Dean Wallace Donham, Harvard University President Lawrence Lowell, and Owen Young, chairman of General Electric. “A great university is longer-lived than any other human institution,” said Gay. “For generation after generation, it renews the springs of high purpose.”
