For the new Genzyme Building, it's what's inside that counts

There are two ways to think about a building. You can look at it from the outside, as a sort of enormous outdoor sculpture. Or you can think about it from the inside, as a set of spaces in which people will live or work.

The new Genzyme Building in Kendall Square in Cambridge is the perfect illustration of the difference. Seen from outside, it's a fairly shapeless and pedestrian-looking object, a loose pile of glass panels of no particular distinction.

But from inside, this is the best and most delightful office building, bar none, this writer has seen in the Boston area.

Henri (pronounced "Henry") Termeer is Genzyme's CEO. His company, which invents and manufactures medicines for rare diseases, got started in 1981 on the 17th floor of a building in Chinatown and grew into an international corporation with 5,500 employees. The Cambridge building is its world headquarters.

"We asked five architects, three European and two American, to propose designs," says Termeer. "Four produced beautiful pictures of buildings, really shells of buildings. Stefan Behnisch did not produce a picture. Instead he explained the building from the inside out, from the employee's point of view.

"We tried not to build a sculpture but a place to work where we would all feel very good."

Stefan Behnisch, the architect, is a partner in a German firm called Behnisch, Behnisch, and Partner. They're best known for their environmentally sensitive "green" architecture. Genzyme is green all right. But that isn't what makes it great. It's the joyous quality of the interior.

Everything at Genzyme wraps around a 13-story atrium. Atriums are common enough, but you've never seen one quite like this. Its top is a glass roof. Above the roof, mirrors track the sun and reflect its light downward into the atrium. Skeins of tiny plastic panels hang down in the space like tinsel. The panels act as prisms, breaking the light into colors that create moving patterns on the walls. Vertical mirrored slats, on one side of the atrium, rotate every six minutes to change the light. And there are half a dozen other games being played with refracted and reflected light.

Then there are the hanging gardens, some 15 of them, scattered all through the building. Each has a geographic theme, "South American Rain Forest," for example.

The gardens are visible emblems of the building's green design, but they also serve the building's deeper purpose. This is to encourage employees to come out of their offices (which are kept small) to meet, mix, and hopefully generate ideas in the amazing variety of shared spaces. In addition to gardens, these include a coffee bar on every floor and a top-floor cafeteria. And there are tiny informal lounge spaces everywhere you look.

Even the entrance works as a mixing valve: Everyone comes up the same wide stair to the reception desk, meeting and greeting as they go, with a powerful sense of communal arrival. Genzyme is a friendly building to its neighbors, too. Much of the ground floor will be occupied by retail stores, which will open outward to engage the city. Indeed, the interior of the building feels like a small-town Main Street, with shopping, eating, recreation, and work all happening in the same space.

A small Boston firm, Next Phase Studios in Jamaica Plain, collaborated on the interiors. The furniture, which looks like crisp, bright Scandinavian modern of the 1950s, was chosen by Behnisch.

Oh, and the green. Genzyme scrambles for every point it can get from the US Green Building Council and its so-called LEED ("Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design") rating. The building does it all, right down to the waterless urinals in the men's rooms and the choice of flush valves in the women's (you get to choose a big flush or a small one, depending on the need).

Much of the building's energy comes from waste steam from a nearby power plant. Half the exterior walls are double walls, with an outside sheet of glass and another one inside, and a 3-foot air space between them that traps heat in winter and vents it in summer. There's a bike room. And so on. Some of this may be more for show than substance, but it's going in the right direction.

Genzyme expects to run the building for a third less money than a typical office building. Total cost, well above standard, was $140 million for 350,000 square feet, including furnishings.

Other than the sheer joy of architecture, what, exactly, is being pursued at Genzyme?

"There's no message," says Behnisch. "It's a place for people."

Termeer, as befits a CEO, is more expansive. "The building emphasizes our willingness to take some risks, to innovate and to spend in a responsible way," he says. "It's innovative in an environmental sense. It's green building on what was a brownfield site."

He talks about transparency, too. Genzyme is a remarkably transparent building. Everyone can see everyone, more or less -- across the atrium, through the glass partitions, or from the outdoors looking in.

"We are about life sciences," says Termeer. "We look for innovation and transparency. In health care you can't do anything in a back room. It must be very transparent and open. It should not be mysterious. The public must be able to see."

What's a little weird about Genzyme is the way it contrasts so violently with the company's other major local building, a manufacturing plant on the Allston bank of the Charles River opposite Harvard. Built a dozen years ago, it's exactly the kind of arbitrary sculptural shell Termeer says he didn't want this time. Its steeply pitched roofs and red brick walls make it look stagy and hollow, as if it were a misplaced fragment of some Victorian college.

Termeer was behind that one, too. "Harvard was there, the business school, and we wanted to be consistent with that picture," he says. He notes that the exterior of the new building is less important than that of the old one, which commanded the riverfront site. View of the new Genzyme will be largely blocked by other buildings in the development, by Lyme Properties, of which it is part. So its exterior appearance, Termeer thinks, will be less important. Perhaps that explains the rather shapeless exterior, which, at least, is an improvement on the foolish kitsch of the older building.

"Office buildings are often very boring," notes Termeer. "They don't say too much. They may look good but don't feel so good when you get inside."

Genzyme feels more than good when you get inside. It feels terrific. This is a building that sets a new standard for corporate architecture in Boston. May others follow its lead.

Robert Campbell can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.