Harvard Graduate School of Design students returned for the fall 2024 semester to find Gund Hall transformed. Yet the iconic building looked much the same as it had since opening a half century ago. And this was indeed the point. Over the summer, a meticulously planned renovation enhanced the facility’s energy performance, sustainability, and accessibility while conserving its original design. Led by Bruner/Cott Architects, this project has transformed Gund Hall into a paradigm for the rehabilitation and stewardship of mid-twentieth-century architecture.
Designed by Australian architect John Andrews (MArch ’58), Gund Hall opened in 1972 to house Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). Since this time, the building’s glass-enclosed five-story studio block, known as the trays, has served as the GSD’s physical and metaphorical center—where students work, interact, and exchange ideas. The trays have been quite successful as a workspace and social condenser, as Andrews envisioned, but less so in terms of environmental consciousness and user comfort. Single-pane glazing and minimally insulated exposed concrete, commonplace at the time of construction and used by Andrews in a forward-thinking fashion, ultimately made the building difficult to heat and cool. Studies preceding the renovation revealed that the trays, which account for 28 percent of Gund Hall’s floor area, were responsible for 46 percent of the building’s energy consumption.
Alongside these financial and environmental costs came a very human one: within the trays, students experienced thermal conditions that ranged from sweltering heat to hand-numbing cold, all while grappling with glare from direct and reflected sunlight and leaks from the stepped roof. Andrews’s experimental design gave rise to an impressive building marked by vulnerabilities that future generations, with access to advanced technologies, needed to address.
David Fixler, lecturer in architecture at the GSD, is chair of the Building Committee, which consists of faculty representing the school’s three core disciplines and oversees the renovation project. According to Fixler, the idea to upgrade the trays’ glazing “had been in and out of the GSD’s eye for the better part of two decades.” The past five years saw the envelope project “revived with a strong emphasis on comfort, energy efficiency, and larger sustainability goals to prove that a building like Gund Hall,” which predates contemporary energy-conservation concerns, “can be made a more environmentally friendly place.” This was a complicated proposition, however, as the renovation’s mandate was to improve Gund Hall’s energy efficiency while acknowledging the stewardship value in conserving Andrews’s original design. In addition, as Fixler noted, “Harvard is a place known for innovation and great design, and we wanted to reflect that as well.”
To develop a realistic scope for the summer renovation—itself the first phase of a multi-year renovation project—the Building Committee worked closely with Boston-based Bruner/Cott Architects, specialists in historic preservation. Project architect George Gard, associate at Bruner/Cott and GSD alumnus (MAUD ’14), noted that the design team’s focus rested on “two main pillars: conserving Gund Hall, and making its facade world-leading in performance.” Harnessing the technology to create a first-rate facade, Gard clarified, was “the easy part; the hard part was understanding the building’s conservation value and marrying the technology to it” while meeting strict dimensional parameters for the glazing members. Jason Jewhurst, Bruner/Cott principal-in-charge, offered an illustrative example, citing the design team’s decision to keep the 50-year-old facade support steel within the studio’s original glazing system. This move aligned with the building’s preservation and helped minimize carbon emissions, yet it also underscored a challenge applicable to much of the Gund Hall renovation: “how do we work with the existing fabric and elevate it with new technology?” Jewhurst asked. As Fixler observed, in the planning and design stages as well as in the field, “this project involved a lot of artistry.”
A primary achievement of the ambitious renovation, which followed a tight construction schedule initiated after commencement in May, involves the replacement of the glass encasing the trays. In total, this amounts to 1,617 glazing units equaling a glazed area of 15,475 square feet. The east curtain wall and clerestory windows employ triple-pane glass, while a custom hybrid vacuum-insulated glass (VIG) composite contributes an additional layer of insulation to the north and south curtain walls. By leveraging the insulating properties of the internal vacuum and marrying it to an additional layer of conventional insulating glass in a sandwich that is overall only a few millimeters thicker than conventional double glazing, the hybrid VIG offers unprecedented thermal resistance. These hybrid units can deliver energy performance that is two to four times better than standard insulating glass and up to ten times more efficient than single-pane glass. While this technology has developed a strong track record in Europe, the Gund Hall renovation is among the first projects in the United States to employ hybrid VIG on a grand scale.
Through choice of glass and special coatings, the reglazing project markedly enhances the balance, distribution, and quality of light within the studio, which is augmented by improvements such as the installation of motorized window shades to help mitigate glare and heat gain from direct and reflected sunlight, and upgraded under-tray lighting for better illumination. Widened exits to the terraces make these outdoor spaces wheelchair accessible for the first time in Gund Hall’s history. In addition, the construction team repaired areas of deteriorating concrete on building’s exterior.
In terms of sustainability, the renovation of Gund Hall exceeds Massachusetts’s stretch energy code for alterations, rendering the building a step above the base code in terms of energy efficiency. Calculations project that, moving forward, the renovated building will save approximately 18,000kg of CO2 emissions per year, resulting in a nine-year carbon payback for the project. Gund Hall will see a 22.2 percent reduction in energy use intensity and a 19.1 percent reduction in utility costs.
Of equal significance to these outcomes are the improvements in user friendliness that stem from the renovation. Not only will everyone be able to access the trays’ outdoor terraces, but “for the first time in over 50 years, the trays will be warm in the winter, cool in the summer, and we won’t have rain leaking onto our desks,” proclaimed Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture. Indeed, alongside the upgrades to the building’s efficiency and sustainability, these qualitative enhancements position Gund Hall as a model for the conservation and revitalization of mid-twentieth-century modern architecture.
“When John Andrews was originally tasked to design a new facility for the Departments of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning and Design,” Whiting noted, “he surprised his clients with a unique building that was at once solid and transparent and that prioritized the student body, united within an enormous, light-filled, single space. Though much has changed since Gund Hall first opened in 1972,” she continued, “the careful rehabilitation of the structure underscores the school’s commitment to this same priority: our students.”
Project Team:
Bruner/Cott Architects – Design and Executive Architect (Prime Consultant)
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- Jason Jewhurst, FAIA (Principal-in-Charge)
- George H. Gard, AIA, Associate (Project Architect)
- Henry Moss, AIA, LEED AP (Consulting Principal for Preservation & Design)
- Mridula Swaminathan, Assoc. AIA (Project Designer)
- SGH – Building Envelope Consultant, Structural Engineer
- Redgate – Owners Project Manager
- LAM Partners – Daylighting Consultant
- Vanderweil Engineers – Sustainability, Electrical Engineer, Mechanical Engineer
- Kalin – Specifications
- Jensen Hughes – Building and Accessibility Code
- Heintges – BECx
- Shawmut Design and Construction – Construction Manager
- A&A Window Products – Glazier (Key Sub-Contractor)
- Oldcastle Building Envelope (OBE 360) – Curtain Wall and IGU Fabricator (Key Supplier)
- Vitro – VIG, Glass Substrate, and Glass Coating Supplier (Key Supplier)
GSD Building Committee Faculty Members:
- David Fixler, Lecturer in Architecture and chair of the Building Committee
- Anita Berrizbeitia, Professor of Landscape Architecture
- Gary Hilderbrand, Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture and chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture
- Grace La, Professor of Architecture and chair of the Department of Architecture
- Mark Lee, Professor in Practice of Architecture
- Rahul Mehrotra, Professor of Urban Design and Planning and the John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization
- Farshid Moussavi, Professor in Practice of Architecture
- Holly Samuelson, Associate Professor of Architecture
- Ron Witte, Professor in Residence of Architecture
GSD Alumni Involvement:
- George H. Gard, AIA, Associate, Bruner/Cott Architects, MAUD ’14
- Henry Moss, AIA, Consulting Principal, Bruner/Cott Architects, MArch ’70
- LeeAnn Suen, AIA, Architect, Bruner/Cott Architects (Former), MArch ’17
- Whitney Hansley, AIA, Assistant Project Manager, Redgate (Former), MArch ’16
- Dan Weismann, AIA, IALD, IES, Associate Principal, LAM Partners, MDes ’12
- Royce Perez, Associate, Heintges (Former), MArch ’17
- Holly Samuelson, AIA, LEED AP, GSD Building Committee Member, DDes
- Farshid Moussavi, ARB, RIBA, RA, GSD Building Committee Member, MArch II ’91
- Gary Hilderbrand, FASLA, FAAR, GSD Building Committee Member, MLA ’85
- Mark Wai Tak Lee, AIA, GSD Building Committee Member (Former), MArch ’95
- Grace La, AIA, GSD Building Committee Member, MArch ’95
- Rahul Mehrotra, GSD Building Committee Member, MAUD ’87