Planning and the northern parts of campus Harvard had been interested in building an undergraduate science center in the 1950s and 1960s. However, in the midst of an economic decline, funding could not be found. No concrete plans were made until in 1968,
Edwin Land, inventor of the
Polaroid "Land" camera, made a $12.5 million donation to construct a science center specifically for undergraduates. Opponents of the plan feared that funding would be insufficient to complete the project, and that the building's maintenance costs would be unreasonably high. The plan called for demolition of Lawrence Hall, a laboratory and a living space built in 1848. By the time of the scheduled demolition, a commune of students and "
street people" calling themselves the "Free University" had taken residence in the unused building. The controversy was rendered moot when fire gutted the building a month later in May 1970. As part of the project, in 196668 the portion of Cambridge Street running along the north edge of
Harvard Yard was depressed into a 4-lane motor vehicle
underpass, thus allowing unhindered pedestrian movement between the Yard and Harvard facilities to the north, including the new Science Center. Architectural historian Bainbridge Bunting wrote that this was the "most important improvement in Cambridge since the construction of [what would later be called]
Memorial Drive in the 1890s". A room-sized historic
electromechanical computer built in 1944, the
Harvard Mark I, was displayed on the ground floor next to the central stairwell in the main lobby of the building (it has since been moved to the Science and Engineering Complex (SEC) in Allston, Massachusetts). == Facilities ==