As I trudged down Talbot Avenue one early February morning, my gaze drifted up toward the mismatched buildings surrounding me.
To my left sat the Mayer Campus Center, nestled into the natural slope of Tufts’ iconic hill. Offering a primetime stage for social butterflies, the Campus Center was built in the mid-’80s and draws from the architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s famed style, boasting three pagoda-like tiers clad in red tile and brick.
Standing opposite the Campus Center — starkly, both in stature and location — was Pearson Chemistry Lab. The main structure was built in the 1920s in the then-typical style of a New England college, before architect Norman Fletcher adjoined the imposing Michael Lab four decades later. The concrete tower can be seen from nearly every part of the lower campus, awkwardly jutting out to remind students of its stark brutalism.
The two buildings seemed so disjointed, as if they were built without knowing they would stare each other down just a few dozen feet apart. The architectural mismatch extends far beyond Talbot Avenue: Barnum clashes with West, and Paige clashes with Braker. That’s not to mention the brand new Eaton Hall, demanding attention with its glassy face. It left me wondering: What, exactly, am I supposed to think as I walk past these buildings?
I took a final few strides past another jumbled collection of buildings — brick-laid Aidekman and Stratton, glass-infused Sophia Gordon and Granoff — lining the street and reached my final destination, 11 Talbot Ave.
I found my way through the narrow, winding hallways of the modest home-turned-home base for the architecture department, concluding my journey at the entrance of a sequestered office room. Professor Matthew Okazaki greeted me at the doorway for our interview.
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Okazaki started practicing architectural design in 2008 and established his own architecture firm a decade later. I wanted to know what he thought of Tufts’ architectural design, so I asked him. Was it as incoherent as I thought?
He pushed back. “Variety is the spice of life,” Okazaki said. “Differences force us to make new connections — it also forces us to negotiate with each other about certain things. Especially in our era, productive friction is a good thing.”
In Okazaki’s telling, Tufts must decide between wanting to become like Harvard, America’s oldest educational institution and a symbol of “history, longevity [and] durability,” or MIT, often at the forefront of scientific research and innovation for a century-and-a-half. A school’s architecture is a “symbol of what the institution is and stands for,” he noted.
“Maybe the direction hasn’t been decided,” Okazaki said of Tufts’ campus. “Most campuses have some kind of feel, whether it’s a Harvard or an MIT. … Brown does, Northeastern actually does to a degree now.”
Asked whether or not Tufts has a distinguishable feel in the same way as these other nearby campuses, Okazaki didn’t have an answer for me. By the end of our conversation, however, Okazaki and I had clarified the mystery I hoped to solve.
“I’m super interested: What is the campus identity at Tufts?” Okazaki said. “That’s the right question.”
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The Academic Quad has long served as the heart of campus, dating back to its 19th-century donation by the school’s namesake, Charles Tufts. Lining the (only occasionally lush) lawn, students can find buildings as old as 1854’s Ballou and as new as 1991’s Olin.
Dare to venture up the Memorial Steps, and the stark white marble and neoclassical columns of Eaton come immediately into view. A portico adorned with an ornate marble pediment atop an imposing set of columns, the eastward-facing side of Eaton evokes a connection to ancient history.
Classics professor Anne Mahoney’s office sits just behind Eaton’s portico, offering a quaint view of the Hill and its Memorial Steps. She said the “Greek-temple looking architecture” of Eaton’s original wing was fairly standard among architectural practice during the early 20th century, when Eaton was built.
To confirm Mahoney’s account, I found myself flipping through the dusty, crumbling pages of magazines like The Architectural Review and The Brickbuilder. Sketches upon sketches grew out of the pages, Eaton among them. As I passed countless examples of early 20th-century neoclassical architecture, I was reminded that Eaton serves as a physical indicator of Tufts’ own past.
“The building has a lot of history in it,” Mahoney said. “It’s an old Carnegie library from when Andrew Carnegie was running around donating money to small towns and small colleges to build libraries. You’ll see a plaque about that on the second floor. It was the first building to be purpose-built as a Tufts library.”
The original structure of Eaton was built in 1908 and served as the university’s main library for almost six decades until the arrival of Wessell — now Tisch — Library in 1965, built to accommodate the collection’s growth.
Eaton is no stranger to major remodels. Following World War II, designers adjoined the War Memorial Library to Eaton’s northern wall as its first major upgrade. Although the addition preserved the original material palette — red brick, white stone — the second buildout sacrificed the ornate detail that defined the original library.
“Even if you aren’t sensitive to architecture, you can tell the older part is fancier,” Mahoney said, classifying the 1950 addition as “low-budget neoclassical.” “The newer part is still brick with white limestone trim, but the limestone trim is very plain. You don’t have fancy columns. … So the building was already sort of a hybrid.”
I also assumed that the white trim of the War Memorial Room extension was made out of similar stone to the original structure. Only after a tip-off from an architect, however, did I realize that it is merely wood paneling painted white.
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Having last been refurbished 75 years ago, Eaton was in desperate need of a modern makeover to bring the building into the 21st century. In early 2021, Tufts enlisted the help of firm Finegold Alexander Architects to conduct a “feasibility study” to find Eaton’s flaws and ways to fix them.
“[We considered] a ‘Mini, Midi, Maxi,’ renovation,” Regan Shields Ives, Finegold Alexander’s principal designer on the project, said. According to Ives, the team proposed a range of possible renovations, ranging from surface-level changes to a complete exterior addition, which “is ultimately what we landed on.”
Finegold Alexander has remodeled practically every type of building, from public libraries and town halls to synagogues and churches across the country. It is known for its work preserving and elevating historic buildings with the use of modern elements, making it an attractive firm to work with on the Eaton remodel.
Early on, the Finegold Alexander team realized that Eaton suffered from problems of accessibility and general efficiency.
“We were really looking at how we could take the existing building and — through a renovation transformation — make it as energy efficient as possible,” Ives said, pointing out that a new mechanical and electrical plumbing system was needed and had to fit within the “existing building envelope.”
Then there was the building’s interior, filled with narrow winding hallways and a multitude of small offices. Ives notes that this layout was “probably not in the optimal configuration for 21st-century higher education,” and that much of the project was spent better fitting the interior for its inhabitants, like the anthropology, classical studies and sociology departments, among others.
“There wasn’t a lot of wiggle room within the building to expand, so we had to really be creative in the layout and use of the building,” Ives said. “It’s like stuffing 10 pounds in a 5-pound bag.”
Students who have visited Eaton since its renovation will have seen this creative restriction play out on its three separate floors. Much of the interior walls still stand as brick-laid reminders of the building’s history yet are contrasted with the modern touches of glass and aluminum that frame its classrooms.
These details are reminiscent of the modern lobby and hallways of the Joyce Cummings Center, a behemoth of a building that was completed in 2021. That style, marked by bright colors and shiny, relatively sparse walls, even extends to the granular detail of the type of toilets used. The hallways of Eaton and the JCC are a far cry from the more traditional, intimately condensed interiors of buildings like East and Braker.
“You’re designing for students of today’s age that feel comfortable in spaces with color and more contemporary or modern furniture [and] interior finishes,” Ives said. “It was agreed upon with Tufts and the planning department that that was the same kind of language and vocabulary that we wanted to carry through.”
One student I spoke with, junior Savvy Thompson, didn’t feel the same way after I caught her on her way out of class one afternoon.
“The glass paneling? Whatever,” Thompson said. “But what the hell are we doing with these carpets? Why is it orange everywhere? I just don’t think it looks aesthetically pleasing.”
Ives said that the team wanted Eaton’s new interior to “represent the time that we are in now and not try to replicate something to make it feel like it was from the 1900s.”
“It’s a big part of our architectural expression and vocabulary in general,” she said. Ives pointed out that the construction process retouched much of the outside brick to bring it back to “its original form,” but completely updated the building’s interior to reflect the contemporary era.
From what I could discern, the design philosophy behind Eaton’s remodel exists in both the past and future, a combination that plays out across Tufts’ campus. As Ives’ colleague, Steve Walnut, put it, Eaton is a “microcosm” of Tufts’ general attitude: maintaining connection to historicism, while pushing the campus toward “what it can be.”
Maybe, then, Tufts doesn’t have to choose between Harvard or MIT.
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The idea of iteration, not replication, extends to Eaton’s new exterior.
Venture around the marble columns of Eaton’s original structure, and you’ll be met with a strikingly modern glass façade added in the remodel. The external addition, comprising 18 panes of glass framed by zinc-colored aluminum, was designed by Payette, an architectural firm recruited relatively late into the renovation process.
While planning for a new elevator — an addition which was prioritized, according to senior campus planners, to bring accessibility up to modern standards — architects ran into natural constraints. Elevators are, “by their very nature, quite disruptive,” Peter Vieira of Payette said. He explained that the most cost-effective place to put one was, in fact, outside the building.
Tufts’ campus planners also tasked Payette with a rather unorthodox objective: Turn the side of Eaton into the building’s front entrance. The two original components of Eaton — the Carnegie Library and the War Memorial Library — face 180 degrees away from one another and fail to open into the main pathway of the Academic Quad — what Vieira called “the most iconic campus space.”
In the telling of both campus planners and Payette, the stylistic disparity between Eaton’s preexisting sides needed fixing. While Vieira said that the aesthetic issue wasn’t necessarily a primary motivator for the remodel, he acknowledged that the old plain-brick siding was “rather nondescript and didn’t really have the kind of monumentality the fronts offer.” The simple face was not considered “a particularly well-resolved joint” between the two halves and failed to make sense of conflicting designs.
“One side was quite elegant, and the materials used were of a significantly higher quality than the other half,” Vieira said. “So you had some funny juxtapositions of things that look similar yet, upon close inspection, were actually pretty different.”
The difference between Eaton’s old and new brick caused the team to rule out using the same or even another brick type for the remodel, which risked perpetuating the original clash. And since the new elevator still needed a protective shell, the glass box was born.
Vieira said that glass, a “neutral material,” was chosen specifically to bridge the gap between the building’s juxtapositions.
“We’re trying to not take away from the authenticity of and the integrity of the original building,” he said. “[Glass] can be a very sympathetic material to actually enable one to appreciate and see more of the authentic historic fabric in a way that, if we had used one of these other materials, … it would compete a little more with them.”
Vieira called the glass box a “gasket,” meant to bridge the visual distance between old and new. He said that it “clearly [needed] to function and be understood as a contemporary addition that’s not original to the building, yet do it in a way that respects the original building.”
Passing by on a recent evening, I saw the silhouettes of two or three students, all silent as they toiled away on their laptops. Thanks to the glass, they had become part of the architecture.
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Architecture professor Diana Martinez has her reservations about the new Eaton. In her opinion, the remodel was practically efficient but suffered creative pitfalls.
First, she noted that Eaton now resembles many other recently renovated buildings in the area. “The interesting thing is that it sort of replicates what Tufts is doing to a lot of buildings on campus — placing this glass block in the middle of a building with a more conventional palette of materials,” she said. “That is the going strategy right now, and in a lot of ways, it’s the easiest strategy to bring light, vertical circulation and a number of different needs.”
Eaton’s resemblance to other buildings is not by mistake. Payette, which took the lead on the building’s exterior renovation, also helmed the vast expansion of the Tsungming Tu Complex in 2017. The TTC, known as the Science and Engineering Complex until last year, is flanked by a massive structure covered almost entirely in glass.
With Tufts’ architects seeming to pursue the style across the redesign projects, Martinez made clear that she isn’t necessarily against this combination of old and new. And yet, “I wish there were other ways to solve the problem,” she said. “Unfortunately, what I think it looks like is you’re just sticking an Apple store in the middle of a traditional building.”
Thompson lamented the loss of Eaton’s uniform traditional style but said she appreciates the remodel’s building quality and level of detail. This, she said, is usually reserved for STEM buildings like the TTC and JCC.
“I would have liked them to keep the old style, but that’s really hard to replicate,” she said. “I don’t mind the glass. I thought it was going to look terrible, and I think they integrated it well with the older parts of the building.”
But, like Martinez, Thompson added that she isn’t a fan of the way the look of the Tufts’ campus is generally headed.
“They’re taking away some of the historic beauty and, in a way, taking away some of the tradition of the school in favor of novelty,” Thompson said, although she acknowledged that the histories of educational institutions aren’t always positive.
I spoke with another architect, Doug Johnston, who helped develop Tufts’ 21st-century style. A principal architect with the firm William Rawn, Johnston helped design Sophia Gordon and a (now outdated) campus master plan in 2004. Johnston was familiar with the state of Eaton prior to the redesign and commended the architects’ bravery for approaching an interior that he called “a complete disaster” that was “bungled so badly over decades of reworking.”
Because he had yet to tour the remodeled building, Johnston declined to comment on the success or failure of the project. He did, however, describe the redesign as a “very bold approach” to combining contemporary design with traditional architecture. He said that redesigns generally come down to whether the client wants a building to be a “revered and cherished part of its past” or instead make “a statement about the boldness of its future.”
From pictures, he confidently guessed that the Tufts team of architects opted for the latter.
When I asked the campus planners and Vieira about this potential statement-making motivation, both parties pointed back to the original goals of the remodel, reiterating that they built the addition to match the functional goals of the project.
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Tufts is facing an architectural identity crisis — one that doesn’t have an easy solution. Maybe its buildings represent the humble New England college it grew from, or maybe they show a glimpse into its research-focused future. What’s clear, though, is that the campus planners’ combination of old and strikingly modern doesn’t quite satisfy that question.
For some, a lack of consistency across buildings means Tufts “doesn’t feel like a college campus, [instead] it just feels like a collection of buildings,” as Thompson said. “When I walk through campus, I see a place that’s still figuring itself out.”
Gaze out from the grand glass windows of Eaton, and the remainder of the Academic Quad will rise up to meet you. You’ll see, as Johnston pointed out to me, a full array of colors on display: the birch yellow brick of Miner and Paige, the burnt red masonry of Packard and the greyscale slate of Barnum. To some, like Thompson, this looks off.
On the other hand, Johnston said, this variety allows architects more room to experiment, free from the restraints typical with working on more intricately planned campuses like those at Washington University in St. Louis and Duke University. Because of this freedom, however, Johnston said the campus is defined by something more intrinsic: its scale.
“That’s, I think, what makes it a neat place architecturally,” he said. “The buildings have a scale that grew from the first buildings on campus.”
That relatively modest scale, he continued, complements the “spirit of humanism and consciousness” at the core of Tufts’ institutional ideals. “There’s a connection between the way that the buildings on the campus are not imposing, are not intimidating [and] are not so grand in their scale that they overwhelm. That enables the students to be a little freer and a little more comfortable there.”
Johnston paused after saying this to me. “Does that make any sense?” he asked, worried about sounding too poetic.
“That’s exactly the type of answer I was hoping for,” I replied.
