The Harvard Lampoon Building is a small Flemish-style red-brick tower that sits on a triangular lot at the intersection of Bow and Mount Auburn Streets, looking like a small castle inexplicably dropped into a Cambridge neighbourhood. It was designed in 1909 by Edmund Wheelwright and bears an unmistakable resemblance to a face — two round windows for eyes, a door in the shape of an open mouth, a pointed cap on top.
The building is the headquarters of the Harvard Lampoon, the oldest continuously published humor magazine in the world, and it is private — you cannot go inside. But the exterior is one of the most photographed and recognisable buildings in Cambridge, and the story behind it (a student humor magazine maintaining ownership of an actual castle for over a century) is itself a good Cambridge story. It sits a short walk from Harvard Square.