Harvard & MIT Cambridge: Boston's University District Guide

Cambridge, directly across the Charles River from Boston, contains two of the world's most prestigious and architecturally fascinating university campuses — Harvard and MIT — that collectively make the neighbourhood one of the most intellectually stimulating destinations in the United States and a genuinely rewarding day trip or afternoon excursion from the Boston city centre.

Harvard Yard is the historic heart of Harvard University, the oldest higher education institution in the United States (founded 1636), and its red-brick Georgian buildings surrounding the famous statue of John Harvard create one of America's most handsome academic landscapes. The university's remarkable museums — the Harvard Art Museums, the Museum of Natural History with its famous Glass Flowers collection, and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology — are open to the public and collectively represent one of the most impressive museum collections attached to any university in the world.

MIT's Stata Center, designed by Frank Gehry, and the surrounding buildings represent a very different architectural philosophy from Harvard's classical campus — a collision of deconstructivist forms and experimental spaces that perfectly captures MIT's intellectual culture. The MIT Museum in Cambridge covers the university's remarkable history of innovation and is particularly fascinating for anyone interested in robotics, artificial intelligence, and the history of computing. The Massachusetts Avenue corridor connecting Harvard and MIT is lined with excellent independent bookshops, cafes, and restaurants that make the walk between the two campuses one of Boston's most rewarding urban strolls.