Blair Kamin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, has a new book out today, The Gates of Harvard Yard. Here, Kamin presents why the illustrious university's gate designs are worth investigating in an exclusive intro for Archinect, followed by an excerpted piece from the book.

In an age that celebrates transparency and openness, it's fashionable to disparage gates. They have become symbols of elitism and exclusion, or just plain ugly instruments of control. Cue the gated subdivision.

But the 25 gates that rim the perimeter of Harvard Yard tell a different story: Gates are expressions of beginning, of belonging, of entry into something larger than oneself. In delineating space, they mark crucial transitions—between ignorance and wisdom, captivity and freedom, life and death. Not for nothing does this oft-quoted inscription appear on one of the gates that lead into the Yard: “Enter to Grow in Wisdom.”

For the new book “Gates of Harvard Yard,” published by Princeton Architectural Press, I worked with a team of Harvard students to explore these themes as well as the fascinating back stories of the gates and (in some cases) Harvard's neglect of them.

Among the tales unearthed by archival research is the saga of the Meyer (Class of 1879) Gate, a story of personal tragedy and institutional aspiration that forever changed the face of America’s leading university.

– Blair Kamin

Excerpt on "Meyer (Class of 1879) Gate":

A Busy Entry from a Quiet Donor

By Rachel Wehr

Class spirit transformed Harvard into the definitive gated community it is today, but Harvard’s first two gates have a darker story. Two weddings and one funeral united an architect, a patron, and a wife: Harvard’s holy trinity forged the university’s iconic image for decades to come.

In 1885 architect Charles McKim and future US ambassador George von L. Meyer were married on the same day, in the same town, only forty-five minutes apart. They were both Harvard men, and they came as close as they could to marrying the same woman—the Appleton sisters, well-known Boston socialites Julia and Marian Alice.

Only a year later, McKim’s wife, Julia, unexpectedly passed away, drawing the remaining three closer together. At Trinity Church in 1888, the architect and Marian Alice memorialized Julia with a stained-glass window. Their dearly departed could not have been far from their minds when, a year later, the triumvirate began to build an architectural legacy with the Johnston and Meyer (Class of 1879) Gates. Johnston Gate came first, and the triumphal gated arch was a tough act for Meyer to follow. When McKim ran out of money before completing Johnston Gate, Marian Alice came to his aid, donating in excess of $6,000 to finish the job, enough that McKim did not have to skimp on the gate’s masterful array of ironwork.

In 1890, seemingly spurred on by his wife’s interest in his alma mater’s architecture (or at least by an interest in McKim’s success), Meyer offered his own gift to the college: another gate at the northern entrance to the Yard, for which he gave an unrecorded—probably very large—sum. Meyer’s gate rises to the challenge posed by Johnston, but does not quite meet it. The ironwork above the gate is more open and less intricate, failing to provide a comforting sense of enclosure. The rounded brick archways, just seven feet tall, are not in keeping with the grandeur of the central passage. At Johnston, in contrast, all the parts are carefully proportioned, forming a persuasive whole.

Meyer, a member of the class of 1879, was remarkably silent on his reasons for giving the gate. His son later confessed that he had never thought to seek an explanation for the donation, and his father never supplied one. Evidence that the gift is Meyer’s is only apparent in two curling Ms hidden in the ironwork above the gate and a small shield that displays his class year. The limestone tablets that celebrate him, including one that depicts a pelican feeding her young (a Christian symbol of self-sacrifice), are worn beyond recognition. In 1944 a university archivist gently suggested to Meyer’s son that a plaque might make the name of the gate more obvious. The son declined, subjecting the gate’s identity to continued confusion.

Since at least 1957, the college’s student-run newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, has consistently and inaccurately called Meyer Gate “Thayer Gate,” in reference to a nearby freshman dorm. The daily sponsored by Harvard’s administration, the Harvard Gazette, occasionally makes the same slipup. Even some university maps call it Thayer. Glory can be bought at Harvard, but because of the continuing printed mistakes, Thayer gets it for free.

Meyer, on the other hand, fades into what Ralph Waldo Emerson once called the “longer train of ghosts” of Harvard’s history. That phrase, which described a Harvard jubilee, adorns a limestone tablet on a curving brick wall that beckons students into the Yard through Meyer Gate.

Still, in some ways, function trumps fashion. When classes are in session, Meyer Gate is the most heavily trafficked of the Yard’s entries, framing the main thoroughfare between the River Houses and Harvard’s biggest classrooms. Viewed in this light, McKim’s design for Meyer seems remarkably foresighted. The gate’s flanking walls of brick help to funnel the throngs of students pushing through after classes—a narrower U-shape like the one at Johnston Gate would cause a perpetual traffic jam. Students flood through the carriage opening beneath the scrollwork, with the more courageous choosing to dart through either of the clogged brick foot gates.

McKim could not have predicted the Science Center that would rise monolithically behind the gate he designed for Meyer, nor could he have anticipated the lively plaza, designed by landscape architect Chris Reed, between the giant modern building and the Yard. The stark division between the modern plaza and the ancient gate draws the eye to Meyer’s shabby disrepair. The central lantern in the iron latticework has neither a light nor panes of glass. Two colossal garbage cans sit beside the gate, unhidden and unashamed.

The story of Meyer’s gate is one full of love, loss, nepotism, mortality, disrepair, and the brave new world of the Science Center plaza. George von L. Meyer and his web of relationships would forever shape this gated university.