Awful Harvard architecture

No, this time we're not talking about that soul-sucking dormitory at 1 Western Ave. Turns out criticizing Harvard architecture is a pastime that goes back generations. Charles Swift uncovers a biting critique of Harvard's building style way back in 1836, by George Cleveland:

... We would cite these as very perfect specimens of no known order of architecture; vast brick barns, destitute alike of symmetry, ornament, and taste; and with all their plain and uncouth proportions, there is a sort of horrible regularity and squareness about them , which heightens their deformity. Four of these edifces are guiltless of any attempt at elegance of architecture, and, making no pretensions. perhaps hardly deserve to be noticed. But what shall we say of the stone edifice, which insults us with its long piazza, and its wooden Ionic pilasters, and the entablature which extends part way across the front? ...

Then again, Cleveland may have been the Mikey of 19th-century architectural criticism: He didn't like anything, including the Bullfinchian Boston that we all so love to death today.