Wondrously out to pasture
Biolabs village-like headquarters thrives in its rural surroundings
IPSWICH -- Too often, when a corporation builds a new headquarters in the country, the building isn't really in the country. By surrounding itself with roads and parking lots, it seems to drag the city right along with it onto its new site.
That's what makes the New England Biolabs headquarters, which recently opened in this North Shore town, so remarkable. Purely as architecture, this is easily the best rural commercial building I've ever seen. More than that, it's truly rooted in every aspect of the world it finds itself in.
New England Biolabs is one of those amazing tech companies that sprang from nowhere into international prominence in the last decades of the 20th century. It was founded in 1973 by Don Comb, who at the time was a professor of biochemistry at Harvard Medical School. Today, besides the lavish new headquarters on 240 acres of rolling pasture here in Ipswich, the company has labs in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
If, like this writer, you're not a whiz on current science, it's a little hard to understand what Biolabs does. ''We send little things all around the world," says Comb. The little things are enzymes. Enzymes are proteins that act as catalysts in reactions with the DNA of cells to fight various diseases, both plant and human. You can find more info at the company's website, www.neb.com.
The building is organized like a sunny village main street. A high, wide, brightly skylit atrium bisects it, like such a street, from one end to the other. Side corridors, like side streets, branch off the atrium at lower levels and cross it as bridges at higher ones. When a side corridor reaches the building's outer wall, it opens out into a room like a small piazza, with a kitchen and a view out to the landscape.
''I wanted the place to feel academic," says Comb, ''not commercial. We do research that happens to spin off commercial products." The average employee (more than half are scientists) has been with the company for 17 years. Tenure, you might say. Researchers run their labs on their own, independently. Biolabs is an example of level management, not of vertical hierarchy.
The interior architecture -- lots of glass with walls, columns, and window mullions in white -- feels taut in a rather nautical way. Outdoors, much of the exterior is surfaced in copper that's been pre-treated to be green.
You enter at one end of the atrium. At the far end, you're one flight higher up and you're looking directly across a lawn at a Jacobean-style mansion. The mansion was the original occupant of this site. It was built in 1898 as a home for a family named Proctor. Its wow feature is a fantastic stair hall. When she first saw it, Mrs. Proctor said to her husband, ''Oh, it's mostly hall." The mansion has, ever since, been known as Mostly Hall.
Biolabs bought the mansion and land from a Catholic organization that was using it as a retirement home for priests. The mansion, carefully restored, is used for administration and function rooms.
Biolabs interacts not only with the landscape, but also with some of its social and cultural context. Some examples:
Comb chose his architect in a unique way. He went out on the Internet and solicited proposals from 291 architects. Those were gradually sifted to five, each of whom (still on the Internet) submitted a sketch design idea. ''We told them the building had to go with the mansion and also preserve the beeches," says Comb. ''It would have been nice if it had been Victorian, but nobody submitted Victorian."
Biolabs picked the sketch of an architect named Chris Williamson from London. His concept of an indoor street aimed at Mostly Hall was then turned over to the Boston firm Jung Brannen, which was recommended by Comb's brother-in-law, developer Don Ciofaro. Jung Brannen then developed the sketch into the present building.
I ask Comb why he sited his building out in the country, when every other biotech outfit seems to want to cuddle as close as possible to either MIT or the Longwood Medical Area. Comb answers candidly, ''Well, it's near where I live." It's possible Biolabs will suffer from isolation. Years ago, the urbanist William Whyte did a study on companies that moved out of Manhattan to what he called ''deer park" suburban campuses, usually within a few miles of the home of the CEO. Whyte concluded they didn't do as well economically as other companies that remained in the city. The latter, White thought, were kept lively by the mix and challenge of ideas in a dynamic urban setting.
Comb would reply, I'm sure, that Biolabs generates its own mix and challenge.
Robert Campbell, the Globe's architecture critic, can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.
