Like movies stars, buildings from our past are often smaller than we imagine.  That’s true of the ones in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I attended architecture school.  I was visiting last weekend, seventeen years after I graduated, and the whole place felt much more welcoming than I remember.  It was a clear afternoon and the leaves, which had turned gold, set off the brick buildings and cloudless sky brilliantly.  I circled the Yard on streets barely wide enough for two cows to pass, with university buildings lined up along them just like in a storybook village.

But one building remained as large and looming, as truly monstrous, as I remember it – Sever Hall.  This undergraduate classroom building is a classic by the great nineteenth-century American architect Henry Hobson Richardson.  It sits back several hundred feet from the street, like a grounded ocean liner.  It’s grave and god-fearing, with an aspect of discipline and renunciation.  Its fortress-like brick facades are broken with small, deep windows and elaborate ornamental terracotta bands.  (What happened to these masonry traditions?  Did they simply vanish?)  I remember Cambridge as a place that offered no respite, imaginatively or physically, whose structures were arch and overbearing.  While the city no longer feels that way, Sever Hall still does.