The Competition

“Only in recent years have business men begun to see that [beauty and utility] may not only be combined but that the beauty of surroundings actually possess[es] a utilitarian value. The Harvard Business School should be able by its structure to embody this truth for many who otherwise would fail to grasp it.”

Baker Library (side elevation), Harold Field Kellogg, Architect, March 11, 1921.

When the idea for the new campus was first conceived, Dean Wallace B. Donham asked Boston architect Harold Kellogg to create blueprints and models of proposed HBS buildings for review by the School’s Visiting Committee and HBS faculty. In 1924, the dean spent the summer in his house in Chatham, Massachusetts with Harvard Graduate School of Design Professor Charles Killam and architecture student Harry Korslund, creating detailed guidelines for the campus architectural competition announced that August. Twelve architects made the final stage of the competition: six candidates from a pool of forty-nine, who had been requested to submit drawings, and six who had worked previously with Harvard or George F. Baker.

Competition drawing for the HBS library by Parker, Thomas & Rice, 1924.

The competition cost more than $40,000, but those involved agreed it created an opportunity for thoughtful and thorough consideration of the School’s needs. The guidelines emphasized that the new site maintain close relations physically, intellectually, and socially with the Cambridge campus. The design, it noted, should encourage an exchange of ideas among students and “the greatest amount of school feeling” in an “atmosphere made as inspiring as possible by the physical environment as well as by the definite ambition of the faculty to help the students be something more than mere money makers.”¹³

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Program for Architectural Competition. Boston: Harvard University, Graduate School of Business Administration, George F. Baker Foundation, p. 9. HBS Archives (AC1924.71), Baker Library Historical Collections. ←