A Scientific Instrument

Harvard Medical School, in an historic expansion rivaling the construction of its original white marble quadrangle a century ago, dedicated its new research building in late September. The glass-walled structure—at 525,000 square feet, Harvard’s largest research and education building ever—will bring transparency to the parallel efforts of the clinical biomedical researchers within Harvard’s affiliated teaching hospitals and the medical school’s departments of genetics and pathology, uniting them in a single space. Speaking at the dedication, HMS genetics-department head Philip Leder ’56 acknowledged that "it is a beautiful, indeed, even striking building [that] could easily stand as a work of art….But of course we realize that it is far more than that: it is, in fact, a colossal scientific instrument, larger than any other used in biology, created to shape the working lives of its occupants…."

The New Research Building as seen from Avenue Louis Pasteur, looking south to the original Medical School quadrangle.

Photograph by Stu Rosner

Designed and built in stages over a remarkably brief three-year span, the building is a monument to the pragmatic blend of form and function. Along the street, its three- and four-story-high façade, much of it glass, allows natural light to reach the windows of the preexisting Harvard Institutes of Medicine, which the new building now enfolds. The central entrance area includes a second-story café for the building’s 800 occupants and their visitors, with a terrace above a waterfall. To the north of the east-west central corridor rises the 10-story research building, packed with the tools of biomedical science: laboratories, autoclaves, freezers, computing centers, and tissue-culture facilities. In this area, architects ARC/Architectural Resources Cambridge Inc. have included split-level eating and meeting areas. These two-story, glassed-in "pods" or "sky-lobbies," situated to take advantage of views of downtown Boston, house the mailboxes, coffee makers, and other amenities that are expected to bring researchers from otherwise separate floors of laboratories together—whether for formal meetings or serendipitous interactions by the proverbial water-cooler. At the corners of the building, to serve the same purpose, are what ARC principal architect Arthur Cohn calls "beacons." These triangular, prow-like glass features—which house lounges and meeting spaces—jut out from the smooth plane of the façade.