Philanthropist George F. Baker and HBS Dean Wallace B. Donham
In 1927, with the support of New York banker George F. Baker and the guidance of HBS Dean Wallace Bd by McKim, Mead and White, came to completion on the banks of the Charles River. The Architectural Forum praised the new campus for exem. Donham, construction of the Harvard Business School campus, designeplifying “the definite idea that business men are to take a large share in that leadership in the community, and that buildings and grounds could and should help in this education.”
A Concrete Symbol: The Building of Harvard Business School, 1908–1927, is an exhibition that looks back at the process behind the planning and building of the campus, which Edwin Gay, the School’s first dean, envisioned as “a concrete symbol of what American business is prepared to give—and be.”
Architectural guidelines, correspondence, early plans, detailed blueprints, elevation drawings, and construction photographs reveal how the expansive, graceful campus gave the School its first real home and helped legitimize the fledgling discipline of business administration. The exhibition continues through September 29 in the North Lobby of the Baker Library/Bloomberg Center at Harvard Business School.
Visit the exhibition web site for more information and a selection of the wide array of materials drawns from the Harvard Business School Archives, as well as the George F. Baker Trust, the Boston Public Library, the Harvard University Archives, the Harvard University Property Information Resource Center, and the McKim, Mead and White Archives at the New York Historical Society.
The exhibition was organized by Baker Library Historical Collections, Knowledge and Library Services, and supported by the de Gaspé Beaubien Family Endowment at Harvard Business School.