Our first stop in Boston was to Harvard University, the alma mater of Barrack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg amongst numerous notable people.

 

 

I fell in love with surroundings the minute I set foot in Harvard Yard. Being acquainted with the modern and professional architecture in NUS and NTU, the Harvard campus offered a refreshing countryside setting with lush greenery and red brick buildings. As our tour guide (an alumni) talked about the history of the university, my attention was drawn to two squirrels prancing about playfully on the grass.

 

 

We walked to the Widener Library; a grand brick building gated by two-storey tall marble columns. It was built in memory of Harry Elkins Widener, a 1907 Harvard alumni who was an avid book collector. He was one of the casualties in the Titanic sinking and legend has it that he did not get onto the lifeboat because he had wanted to retrieve his favorite book from the state room. Following his death, his mother donated a sum of money for the construction of the library.

 

 

Next photo stop was with the famous bronze statue of John Harvard, the benefactor of the university. Increasingly widely known, the handsome figure reclined on the armchair with a hardcover on his lap is actually not John Harvard but Sherman Hoar, who graduated from Harvard in 1882. Amidst the tanned façade of the statue, the left shoe gleams due to a tradition of rubbing it for luck.

 

 

As we walked about the campus, we stumbled upon “Pooh’s House”; a tree with a miniature wooden door and a “Pooh” label above it. Sadly, there was a notice informing that the tree will be removed the very next day due to its declining health. What luck to witness the Pooh House on the eve of its eviction.

 

 

After a shopping spree at the Harvard Shirt Shop, we stopped by the Trinity Church and Boston Public Library.

 

 

We then proceeded to Quincy Market for lunch. The historic marketplace boasts of the best clam chowders and lobster rolls. Though not a fan of seafood, I enjoyed the meaty chunks of lobster sandwiched between a baguette.

 

 

After lunch, we crossed the Harvard Bridge which spans across the Charles River to the other premier institution in Boston, renowned for producing inventive thinkers and Nobel laureates – The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

 

The campus has a more conventional setting with modern buildings which the students took the liberty to spruce it up with their out-of-the-world ideas.

 

 

Featured on the banner is the Brass Rat, MIT's class ring.

 

 

Standing in front of Killian Court which is being prepared for commencement, the iconic Great Dome looks a tad bare that day. The dome is often the subject of hacks with students assembling a variety of replicas from police car to space module on top of it to demonstrate their technical genius.

 

Source: http://www.cbc.ca

 

The Killian Court is surrounded by marble buildings with frenzies bearing the names of famous scientists carved in large Roman letters.

 

 

The Green Building, characterised by a grid of rectangular windows, is well known for several reasons: (1) it is designed by I. M. Pei, the man responsible for the elegant Louvre pyramid in Paris and (2) it is again a common subject of hacks, the most spectacular of which is turning it into a playable Tetris interface.

 

Source: http://hacks.mit.edu

 

The Strata Center, with its unconventional jagged exterior, is an eye-catcher. But multiple issues with its functionality began to crop up over the years which led to MIT filing a lawsuit against the architect.

 

 

We entered lecture theatre 26-100 with the retro yellow wooden chairs and the moveable blackboards that stretch across the hall. Unerased on the board, the chalk scribbles of the equation of the period of a pendulum reminds us of the times where the celebrated physics professor Walter Lewin conducted his numerous precarious demonstrations to the cheers and hollers of his class.

 

Source: http://web.mit.edu