How should Town Hall be (re)used? Should town offices remain, or should they be moved? Should upper town hall be restored to its former uses?

Before the workshop I had the sense that an almost "for sure" plan was to move town offices to the old library. I was delighted to find that the consensus from the charrette is to leave them at Town Hall, with certain expansion possibilities. The Town Hall is where they should be! Freeing the second floor of the building will make the space inviting for a variety of community activities.

I would like to see us rethink how we use the town land in the center (on which the central fire station, town hall, the old ambulance building, and Hildreth House reside). In my view, we now have a hodge-podge of buildings, no clear delineation between walkways and motor vehicle access, insufficient parking, random and insufficient lighting, insufficient and poorly-laid-out green space, and a fairly dangerous exit off of Ayer Rd (for both pedestrians and autos). The only building that has any architectural merit, in my eyes, is the Hildreth House. Town Hall is purely functional and from an era that didn't value accessibility.

Let's take a big step back and draw up a long-term site plan for this land that solves these problems. We can set aside areas for buildings, for roadways, for sidewalks (!), for parking, and for green space. Let's set aside some space for future expansion of office space. While we can't get from here to there overnight, all of the buildings that are there now are going to wear out over the 50-100 years and need to be replaced. As we replace them, we can rework them into the new master plan.

I'd rather see Harvard build and maintain a few larger-sized buildings to hold government offices than continue to prop up a multitude of small, old, unremarkable buildings. I think it would be less expensive in the long run to build a single new office than to continue with what we have now. Certainly, from a maintenance and heating point of view, this has to be true. The old buildings we have now can't have great insulation, or be conducive to solar heat. They certainly aren't accessible by any stretch of the imagination.

Let's also be clear that I'm not proposing any specific architectural design when I say I want a new office building; I'm perfectly happy putting up a building that reflects the late Victorian era of the surrounding homes, and reflects the style of the existing Town Hall. But I would propose a modern interior.

If we are truly looking 100 years down the road, then we are looking well past the lifetime of the existing buildings. Our planning should reflect that fact.

Thanks
PG

Hello Paul,

I'm happy for you to figure out a replacement fire station, and rejigger some walkways, but you can't knock down Harvard's historic Town Hall. While people have done some awful things to it, there is still a sweet old building there, which fits in nicely with the surrounding architecture, and which can't be replaced. It needs work, and it's actually got some good friends now steering it in the right direction, but even if we were starting from scratch on the project, the economics of restoring it compared to knocking it down, disposing of it, and then building a modern office building would be highly debatable, and we'd lose something irreplaceable in this historical New England landscape, of which we are the stewards.

There's something way off about the logic that says throwing something away and building something new that's more "green" is a net ecological gain. It's like the replacement window scam. It takes 30 to 60 years to recover the cost of replacing an antique window (which is a repairable object), but the new window (which is not as repairable) is only expected to last for 25 years. It's a much better idea, economically and ecologically, to invest the extra ten minutes necessary to find someone competent to fix the old one.

Also, the town has a mixed history, regarding new construction. Most examples of it are just awful: the high school, the post office, etc. We do better with projects that have very strong oversight and care for context, such as the library addition, and there's a great risk that a modern office building over there would probably be just horrendous, aesthetically speaking.

--Jonathan