VAC BOS: The Graduate School of Design and the Construction of Le Corbusier's Carpenter Center

This exhibition celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the design of Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center, his only realized work in North America.  In addition to establishing a new home for Harvard’s Center for Visual and Environmental Studies, the project laid bare the importance of the Graduate School of Design, its Dean, Josep Lluis Sert and its professors, namely Eduard Sekler, in bringing modernist architecture to the red brick landscape of Cambridge. This exhibition seeks to augment the more commonly known architectural history of the building with documents detailing its behind the scenes relationship with the GSD. This exhibition will also present, for the first time to a public audience, the drawings Le Corbusier produced for his design presentation to the Harvard Corporation, drawings which secured support from the university for the project. Bruce Seth Green’s documentary of the building is on display on the wall adjacent to the entrance of the library and captures the excitement among an American audience for Modernism’s most eminent architect.

Peter Christensen (PhD ’14),  curator