Gates of Harvard Yard

Offering the complete, never-before-told story of the twenty-five gates that form portals to Harvard Yard, this beautiful gift book recounts the aesthetic vision for America's preeminent university, developed by renowned architecture firm McKim, Mead & White.

The book discusses the architectural intentions of the gates, as well as the human drama behind their fruition--tales of wealth, power, and institutional and personal ambition.

Illustrated with previously unpublished sketches by Roger Erickson, architect and landscape architect; stunning color photographs of each gate by Ralph Lieberman; and a beautiful hand-drawn three-dimensional aerial map of Harvard Yard that denotes the location of each gate by RISD graduate student Christopher Beck.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin is one of the nation’s leading writers on architecture and urban design. A graduate of Amherst College and the Yale School of Architecture, Kamin was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2012-13; during the fellowship, he co-taught a Harvard Wintersession course on the gates of Harvard Yard that led to this project. Kamin’s previous books include two collections of his columns published by the University of Chicago Press, ＂Why Architecture Matters: Lessons from Chicago＂ and ＂Terror and Wonder: Architecture in a Tumultuous Age.＂