New research buildings in Boston will be experiments in collaborative research.
Pat McCaffrey
Around town, new science buildings are popping up like spring daffodils. Two will open on Harvard’s Cambridge campus within the next year, and the planning of the first science buildings on Harvard’s new Allston campus is well underway, with groundbreaking scheduled for later this year. All will house researchers from different fields, affiliated with recently created interdisciplinary initiatives (for other buildings, see this Datapoints article).
These projects have prompted Harvard scientists to work closely with architects to come up with building designs that will foster collaborative research. The hope is that a building with the right mix of informal social spaces will promote more communication and sharing and help researchers overcome disciplinary divides. Over the next several years, the scientists moving into these facilities will become part of an experiment to see if architecture can change the way people do science.
Harvard’s Laboratory for Integrated Science and Engineering, scheduled to open this summer, will bring together researchers from different disciplines.
“We want our building to be an important part of our culture, and the culture we are looking for is highly interactive,” says David Scadden, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and co-chair of Harvard’s new Department of Developmental and Regenerative Biology. Both entities will be the first occupants of the Allston campus’s first building, scheduled to open in 2010.
Stem cell center
For this half-million square foot complex on Western Avenue, Harvard chose the same German firm, Behnisch Architects, that designed the Kendall Square building for Genzyme, a biotechnology company based in Cambridge.
Scadden says he was inspired by the glass structure, which features a central atrium and gives people on all 12 floors the opportunity to cross paths on a daily basis. Although that Genzyme site doesn’t have labs, employees told Scadden that the layout changed the way they worked and interacted across teams.
“The building is designed so that you see people you wouldn’t normally see,” says Robin Goldwater, director of reimbursements and specialty services for Genzyme’s renal division. “It’s a much friendlier space than any other I’ve worked in and I constantly run into people from other departments—other areas that I might not have run into before.”
The top-floor cafeteria and the elevators that lead to it are hot spots for casual interactions, says Goldwater. Gardens on every floor also provide areas for impromptu encounters.
The early plans for the Allston science center have many similar features: enclosed green space, airy atriums, lots of natural light, and a single dining area. Wide stairways linking indoor gardens are designed to encourage chance meetings between researchers from different floors.
To mingle or not
Still, promoting interactions among scientists won’t be easy, says Harvard physicist Charles Marcus. He headed up the committee of researchers that worked with award-winning architect Rafael Moneo on the design of the Laboratory for Integrated Science and Engineering (LISE) on Oxford Street in Cambridge, slated for occupation this summer. The building will house the Center for Nanoscale Systems, which Marcus directs.
For instance, having a nice café in a building is no guarantee that researchers will mix and mingle there. “We don’t allow ourselves the indulgence of going to the café,” Marcus says of his fellow scientists. “You have to accidentally walk by the café, see that your friend is sitting there, and get sucked in inadvertently.”
To achieve that effect in LISE, the café will be on the ground floor, adjacent to the main flow of traffic in and out of the building. This detail was not part of the architect’s first design; it came from the committee of researchers, says Marcus. He admits that in helping to guide the architects, he relied on his intuition, experience working in other buildings, and knowledge of the personality of scientists, rather than on hard data.
The question of whether the buildings will succeed in fostering more collaboration will be hard to answer quickly, the researchers say. What might work for one biotech company or for another university might not work for Harvard. Each structure is a sociological and architectural experiment, whose success will be measured only by the quality and quantity of the discoveries made under its roof in the coming years.