Austin Hall (Harvard University) Austin Hall (Harvard University) Austin Hall is a classroom building of the Harvard Law School designed by noted American architect H. H. Richardson. The first building purposely built for an American law school, it was also the first dedicated home of Harvard Law School. It is located on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. The hall was built 1882–1884 in Romanesque Revival style. Single-story wings flank a heavy, two-story central mass, with the reading room extending rearwards to form an overall T shape. A central entryway framed
History of Harvard University Radcliffe College, established in 1879 as sister school of Harvard College, became one of the most prominent schools for women in the United States. In the 1920s Edward Harkness (1874–1940), a Yale man with oil wealth, was ignored by his alma mater and so gave $12,000,000 to Harvard to establish a house system like that of Oxford University. Yale later took his money and set up a similar system. In addition to the usual department, specialized research centers proliferated, especially to enable interdisciplinary research projects that could not be handled at the department level. However, the departments kept jealous control