Harvard Graduate Center
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The Harvard Graduate Center, also known as "the Gropius Complex" (including Harkness Commons), is a group of buildings on Harvard University's Cambridge, MA campus designed by The Architects Collaborative in 1948 and completed in 1950. As the first modern building on the campus, it represents one of the first endorsements of the modern style by a major university and was seen in the national and architectural presses as a turning point in the acceptance of the aesthetic in the United States.[citation needed]
For The Architects Collaborative (TAC), an important modernist firm headed by seven Harvard graduates and Walter Gropius (then chair of the University's Department of Architecture within the Graduate School of Design), the Center was one of their first important works.
The building contains work from avant-garde Surrealist or Bauhaus artists Joan Miró, Josef Albers, Jean Arp and Herbert Bayer. A sculpture by Richard Lippold is in a nearby courtyard.[1]
The buildings are now primarily used as a student center and as a dormitory complex for Harvard Law School.