Harvard Art Museums

The Harvard Art Museums project renovated, restored, and expanded the institution’s facilities and centralized the collections, galleries, and curatorial staff of the Fogg Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum into one state-of the art building. The museum contains gallery spaces of varying sizes, art conservation laboratories, specially designed study rooms, a 300-seat auditorium, and art storage areas. The building is LEED Gold certified.

The original structure at 32 Quincy Street was built in 1927, with additions and renovations occurring in almost every decade thereafter. The new project involved removing all of the later additions to the original construction and building a new addition on its east side. The roof of the 1927 building has been replaced by a new glass-walled study center that extends over a previously enclosed courtyard, linking it to the surrounding spaces.

It was important to the university and the design team to keep as much of the existing building as possible both to respect the history of the building and to conserve materials. However, in order to accommodate the new program, it was necessary to remove areas of existing structure to either provide egress, MEP shafts, or new framing for areas with higher live loads such as high density storage.

To meet state building code requirements for a seismic retrofit within the existing building, Silman created a lateral system of concentrically braced frames using a combination of plate-reinforced existing columns and new steel columns. Because the existing spread footings under the reinforced existing columns were insufficient, new minipiles were drilled through the existing footings. New steel armatures transfer the loads from the existing columns into the minipiles.

The existing floor system did not have the diaphragm capacity to transmit lateral forces into the new braced frames, so Silman added new steel horizontal lateral members at the underside of the existing joists to supplement the existing floor structure. Coordinating the locations of these members – with MEP systems, unforeseen field conditions, and finished ceilings that were as high as possible – presented a complex challenge during design and construction.

The column-free galleries on the second and third floors of the new addition required 50-foot-long spans. These galleries cantilever 15 feet to the east and over 12 feet both to the north and south. These cantilevers in turn support smaller cantilevered “winter gardens” – intimate gallery spaces with movable exterior facade panels to control light. To control the deflection of the winter gardens’ cantilevers so that the exterior panels could be movable, Silman designed full-height trusses along the north and south face of the building that support these nested cantilevered rooms.