Earlier this month I visited the campus of Harvard University to see archival file folders located in the basement of the Frances Loeb Library at the renowned Harvard Graduate School of Design. For nearly 70 years modernistic architectural design plans for high-rise hotels and casinos have been filed under “Block Island Design Project, 1952.” All these architectural designs, drawings and photographs of models stemmed from the following design question, “Suppose we bought all of Block Island, razed it with bulldozers and turned it over to you, what would you do to make it the most modern, complete vacation center in the world?”Over the past six months of our work digitizing the Historical Society’s archival collection (funded by the Annenberg Foundation) I have found crumbs hinting at this intriguing 1951-1952 Harvard study centered on Block Island. Newspaper clippings showed models of the familiar Block Island landscape with modernist building designs including casinos, dog tracks and high-rise hotels. As a child of the 1970s, I must admit these radical modernistic plans made me think of my time at preschool watching reruns of the animated sitcom “The Jetsons.” As this collection was not digitized, I needed to visit the archives in
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