Memorial Church in Winter, Harvard Yard, Cambridge, 1960s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Memorial Church in Winter, Harvard Yard, Cambridge, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

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Memorial Church in Winter, Harvard Yard, Cambridge, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1960–1969

AA-2026-5A4772

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The steeple went up in the eighteenth-century style because Harvard has never met a tradition it wasn't willing to rebuild in brick and paint white. By the 1960s the building behind it, Memorial Church, was doing less theological work and more ceremonial work, which is the fate of most campus chapels once the student body starts reading Sartre instead of scripture.

A few small figures cross the Yard on the diagonal paths that generations of undergraduates wore into the grass long before anyone thought to pave them, proving that a university can spend three centuries on architecture and still let its students pick the walkways. The trees are bare in the particular way New England trees are bare from November to April, which is to say for most of the academic year, so nobody in the photograph looks especially bothered by it.

Off to the right a second tower rises behind the bare branches, a reminder that a campus like this one accumulates landmarks the way other places accumulate car parks. The steeple gets photographed. The people walking under it get forgotten, which is roughly the arrangement they signed up for when they enrolled.

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