Outside the box

SCIENCE IS A dizzyingly diverse enterprise. The buildings that house scientists, however, have long been numbingly uniform. Picture a laboratory. You are probably envisioning one of the regular, modern, rectangular boxes plunked down on university campuses and research parks across America since World War II.

To the delight of many architects and scientists, however, the lab-in-a-box is losing favor. In recent years, more science buildings have begun to feature flexible work spaces, large common areas, fancy atriums, irregular shapes, and other relative extravagances once unseen in the workaday laboratory.

These changes are not just ornamental. Increasingly, they come from the drawing boards of architects who have been pondering how scientists think and work. Some architects have even reached a conclusion not always present in the history of lab design: Scientists are not just cogs in a research machine, but highly creative -- and highly social -- thinkers.

"It's not a directive on the part of the designer," says the New York-based architect Rafael Vinoly, who has recently designed several high-profile and innovative laboratories. "It's really just a response to the hidden requests of people all over the world, who have been tortured by buildings that have not really changed in 50 years."

With last week's opening of Frank Gehry's new MIT laboratory, the Ray and Maria Stata Center, Boston-area residents have the chance to see a shiny new example of this trend for themselves, courtesy of the world's best-known architect. Still, Gehry's energetic (if still unfinished) sprawl of tilting towers, cylinders and blocks raises an unanswered question: Does innovative architecture really help produce innovative science?

Gehry himself, speaking at the Stata Center on Wednesday, called most of MIT's buildings "fairly stodgy," and described the previous look of Vassar Street, where the new building stands, as "morose." And among its boxy neighbors the Stata Center stands out as if lit up in neon. But however outwardly flashy, the building has a pragmatic aim: to encourage the diverse menagerie of researchers it houses -- from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Laboratory for Information and Decisions Systems, and the Linguistics and Philosophy Department -- to collaborate as much as possible.

"The thing that's really creative in research comes out of people bumping into each other, chance encounters, and conversations," says William Mitchell, head of MIT's Media Arts and Sciences program and architectural advisor to the university president. It's no longer enough to give scientists nice offices or new lab equipment. To produce good work, the theory goes, they also need to talk to colleagues.

To this end, the Stata Center's interior is a warren of winding corridors and twisting internal staircases, leading to clusters of offices and hub-like group workspaces. Naturally lit double-height lounges with spiral staircases also link adjacent floors. A two-story "student street" meanders through the entire ground floor, linking the building's various segments.

Already, say some faculty, the Stata Center is working as intended. "If you walk by the lounges, they're always occupied," says John Guttag, chair of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at MIT. "The boards in the lounges have things on them. People are using the communal space much more than they did in our old building. They're attractors because they have windows and views."

But others inhabitants see a downside to the emphasis on communal work. "You are forced to walk by work space," agrees Allen Bryan, a graduate student in the Health Science and Technology department. "But it also makes the place noisy. It's like they didn't think of that." Some researchers have moved from private offices in their old buildings to common spaces in the new one -- like the 5th floor area with an ironic sign about the "free-range" students inside.

For all the attention to the dramatic exterior, Gehry maintains he designed the building from the inside out, in order to produce the "collisions of people by accident" the MIT faculty wanted: "If the building seems weird, or strange, not linear, it is because of these issues."

As a whole, the new science architecture involves a broad rethinking of scientific production, shunning the factory aesthetic of modern labs, with assembly lines of workstations, and embracing the information age, where communication is vital. Today, the watchword in the sciences is "interdisciplinarity." And if you see a lab with a distinctive form on the outside, chances are it's interdisciplinary on the inside.

Not that all buildings that aim to foster connectivity and communication on the inside look as wild as Gehry's on the outside. Some of Vinoly's buildings, for example, add new twists to familiar shapes. His Van Andel Institute for Cancer Research in Grand Rapids, finished in 2000, features three shelves of labs cascading off a vertical building structure. The California Nanosystems Institute, under development at UCLA, links boxy buildings via angled, suspended walkways across a central atrium. And his recently-opened Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, at Princeton University, includes a pair of conventional, rectangular lab spaces, roughly forming an L-shape -- but encases them in a larger building skin, in which a triangular, building-height atrium is fronted by a curving glass curtain.

Sometimes the new science architecture can look almost old-fashioned. At Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, a diverse collection of largely biomedical labs have a traditionalist look, with relatively small buildings intended to preserve the village-like feeling of the historic property. Even so, many of the new additions to the lab contain common workspaces. The same ideas behind the Stata Center -- sociability, interdisciplinary exchange -- have taken a radically different form.

Because many of the cutting-edge research projects housed in new science buildings, from computer science to molecular biology, involve the study of networks, it is tempting to regard the network as the governing metaphor for today's new science architecture.

But to think of the new science architecture primarily in metaphorical terms is to lose sight of its purpose. "People make a radical distinction between the symbolic and the practical," says Peter Galison, a professor in the history of science department at Harvard, and coeditor of "The Architecture of Science," a collection of essays on laboratory design. "But inside buildings, when people build these lounges with radial connectors, they're trying to do something which is both symbolic and practical."

Vinoly believes it would be counterproductive to approach a project with set ideas about how a building might embody a network. "The question of how you incorporate this into the work is certainly not figural. You don't try to make it like a network."

For architects, the point isn't to design a network, but to allow scientists to organize their own. Vinoly's Howard Hughes Medical Center, under construction in Leesburg, Va., is designed to leave space open for reconfiguration according to the scientists' evolving needs. The Stata Center contains areas meant to provide similar flexibility -- as did the site's previous structure, ramshackle Building 20, where researchers on occasion knocked out walls or ceilings to expand their lab space. "If this had become precious architecture where everything had been perfectly organized, that would have been off-putting," said Gehry on Wednesday.

All the talk about architecture and interdisciplinary collaboration can seem like a fad. But many observers believe scientific research really has become more interdisciplinary within the last decade.

"We're living in quite a transformation within the sciences, and I don't think anyone has a completely clear idea how this is going to play out," says Galison. "But it is clear that it's not going to look like the isolated island empires of the postwar period. There's not going to be physics over here, chemistry over there, and biology in a third place." Vinoly describes it as a "booming moment of intellectual development, with major conceptual changes in the way disciplines are organized."

Galison also believes these innovative labs represent a step in the right direction: "The intellectual act of having to explain yourself, and form a common language, is crucial in the construction of new disciplines. The engineers, the physicists, the biologists and the chemists have to learn to speak to one another. That's not trivial. They look at a nanotube, and the physicist sees a wire, and the chemist sees a big molecule." Eventually, he adds, these scientists will develop a "scientific pidgin or creole that joins them together." The new architecture could be an integral part of that process.

However, even advocates of the new science labs concede the buildings have additional, more prosaic purposes. As universities increasingly seek private-sector investments for research, showcase buildings can impress prospective partners. "MIT engages industry a great deal," acknowledges Mitchell. "The disciplines housed in the Stata Center engage industry a great deal too. And that means you've got to effectively bring people in from industry to the campus." For the moment, that seems to have come at a price, with some at MIT grumbling about cost overruns on Gehry's building at a time of salary freezes.

But MIT officials do expect the Stata Center to lure more academic talent to East Cambridge. "I think it will be a great tool for recruiting," says Guttag. Additionally, notes Tom Gieryn, a sociologist at Indiana University who has studied science buildings, these research centers can serve as a political compromise by providing new space for multiple departments. "The idea of multidisciplinarity becomes a dean's dream," says Gieryn.

Still, if a well-designed lab cannot guarantee breakthroughs, a poorly designed building can surely make them harder. Take the two American laboratories designed by the famous postwar architect Louis Kahn.

His first, from 1957, the Richards Medical Research Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, was hailed at the time as a concrete-and-brick alternative to the steel-and-glass International Style. But the building was so prone to overheating that biologists used to cover its windows with newspapers, and as the engrossing recent documentary "My Architect" notes, its current occupants still feel cramped.

Kahn's more famous laboratory, the Salk Institute in La Jolla, completed in 1965, was far more successful -- and shows that the multiple needs of scientists can be contained within symmetrical, almost classical form. The original plan combined an open lab design with private offices featuring ocean views, an idea Kahn called "dichotomous space." Kahn even designed a community meeting space on the institute grounds, but his funds ran out.

The Salk Institute has long been hailed as a masterpiece, not just of science architecture but of architecture, period. But instead of spawning imitators, the Salk remained an exception among labs.

"In the postwar expansion of science and engineering, there were a huge number of extremely utilitarian lab buildings built," observes MIT's Mitchell. Such functional structures, he adds, "fit with the ideology of modernism, of modern architecture, which was very much interested in modularity, repetition, and the machine aesthetic." Many science buildings of the era, from campus labs to those built for the Atomic Energy Commission, were assembled from generic blueprints, without an architect.

Mitchell dates the current trend of innovation to the late 1990s. Even so, some architects still believe the technical requirements of lab construction preclude creative design. A typical 1998 textbook on the subject, Brian Griffin's "Laboratory Design Guide," says the "trend in architecture to irregular, sometimes curve-shaped, spaces, away from the modernist square or rectangular shapes is not suitable for laboratory spaces. Laboratory benches and equipment are rectangular and do not fit into irregular shapes."

A building as irregular as the Stata Center does not score well by a textbook metric of design: the percentage of space used functionally, as labs or offices. Then again, argues MIT's Guttag, it does not need to if the aim is to stimulate collaboration. "One has to rethink some conventional notions of efficiency," he says.

Like the new, interdisciplinary forms of science it serves, the new science architecture is very much an experiment in progress. Its designers seem aware of this.

"I'm sure there are people who aren't going to like it," mused Gehry in the Stata Center on Wednesday. "Those people are going to find ways to accommodate themselves. If they can't, we've failed."

Peter Dizikes is a journalist living in Arlington.