Site Seeing
What’s up, what’s down, and what’s under construction
Space. The final frontiers—the last major developable parcels owned by Harvard in Cambridge—will soon have new buildings on them with all manner of space for faculty and staff members and students. Soon Harvard will look to a future in Allston. Site work has already begun across the river for the largest building Harvard has ever put up. What follows is a guide to the construction underway on frontiers old and new.
The Northwest Science Building was designed to foster interdisciplinary collaboration among 30 researchers, their laboratories, and staffs.
In Cambridge, if you ask to see the Northwest Building, you may be directed to one of two projects. If you query a legal eagle outside Langdell Hall, he will tell you about a vast new edifice rising at the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Everett Street, at the northwesterly corner of the Law School campus. But if you ask a biophysicist waiting eagerly for the completion of her wet lab space, she will reply that the Northwest Building lies on Hammond Street at the intersection of Oxford Street, in the block just north of the Harvard Museum of Natural History.
Both your well-meaning guides would be right. To distinguish between the two, explains a helpful philologist on his way to Widener Library, you must be specific: the Northwest Corner Building is at the Law School; the other is called the Northwest Science Building. (Perhaps generous donors will lend them more distinctive names in time.) Which has a fairer claim to the current name? The science building was begun first, and is by far the larger. But technically, the Law School’s entry is farther northwest. In an argument, the legal eagle could best you on a technicality like that. Best not to argue with a lawyer.
The Northwest Science Building, with about 210,000 square feet of above-ground space (and another 260,000 square feet below, plus additional room for a deep parking garage) contains academic space for 30 faculty scientists and their laboratories, technicians, students, post-doctoral fellows, and administrative staffs. Not including faculty and students, there will be about 320 other people working there.
The space was designed by an experienced hand, Craig Hartman of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill-San Francisco, who consulted on the plans with neighbors on Hammond Street and to the north to ensure that the transition from campus to residential streetscapes would be a pleasing one for all concerned. In fact, the original design included low structures that ran parallel to Hammond Street, forming an enclosed courtyard.
Above and below: The brick-and-glass Northwest Science Building wends its way among existing structures along Hammond and Oxford streets.
The neighbors understood, but said, “Open the space to us, so we don’t feel walled out.” Hartman turned and reconfigured the building. Lighted walkways now connect the neighborhood to what will become a green open space designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, the noted landscape architecture firm that guided the replanting of Harvard Yard more than a decade ago. Soon neighbors and occupants alike will traverse open spaces that once were bounded by a high metal fence topped with barbed-wire, a legacy of the Cold War era when Harvard’s cyclotron represented cutting-edge atomic physics.
In addition to laboratories, some configured especially for teaching, the Northwest Science Building will have classrooms and seminar rooms and collection space. No single department will move there. The interior space is designed to encourage the formation of interdisciplinary clusters of related research groups. Neuroscientists like Joshua Sanes and Jeff Lichtman are expected to move in; but there will also be astro- and particle- and biophysicists—the place will fairly fizz with them. Engineers and applied physicists will work with molecular and cellular biologists on problems in areas such as tissue engineering, biological imaging (see page 40), and biomechanical devices. Below grade, the place will hum with activity of a different sort. An electrical substation will be located there, and a chilled-water plant will provide cooling capability to surrounding buildings.
In early April, the temporary yet imposingly tall fences that had been erected three years ago to mitigate the effects of construction on the neighborhood began to come down. Trees appeared. Inside, workmen put the final interior touches in place, installing lights, applying paint, and laying floors. Windows were being washed. Signs of growth and renewal were everywhere.
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