Better science through building design
Open spaces bring people, and ideas, together
Nobody used to write about the architecture of science labs.
Something's changed, though. Walking into a biotech or engineering lab today can be as exciting, visually, as walking into a rock club or the latest hot restaurant.
The obvious example is the new Stata Center at MIT, by California architect Frank Gehry, famed for its precariously curving, tilting walls and its nursery-toy shapes and colors.
But Stata is only one of a new generation of labs. They're fun to work in and provocative purely as architecture. Two recent examples are outstanding. One is the glorious Waltham headquarters of a venerable firm of consulting engineers, Simpson, Gumpertz & Heger. Another is the Hollywood-spectacular lab building of the Swiss-led
The heads of these firms and their architects all talk, word for word, the same language as the guys who built the Stata Center. They say the architecture is all about getting isolated scientists to interact with one another.
''We wanted to move from private offices and labs to open space," says Glenn Bell, the CEO of the Simpson firm. ''We wanted people to get out and meet each other, we wanted the cross-fertilization of ideas. We wanted transparency, so people could see what others were doing. We felt there was value in synergy among different disciplines."
Such words are a standard rap in today's world. But in these buildings, they become the program for remarkable architecture.
Novartis is amazing, but I like Simpson, Gumpertz more. This is a firm that specializes in structural engineering and in the engineering of exterior walls and roofs, such as glass curtain walls. The architects are Winter Street Architects of Salem. They've created an interior full of surprise and satisfying in its use of daylight, colors, and materials. Not surprisingly, the engineering company found that its productivity and profit went up as soon as it moved into the renovated building.
I asked Bell why he chose a relatively young and little-known firm.
''We visited their office," he says. ''There were materials that were unconventional for an interior space, used in interesting ways. There was a Spartan look. It conveyed quality without ostentation. They had a climbing wall. Other firms didn't fit our image. We don't want to appear wasteful."
Architecturally, the Simpson, Gumpertz space, at 41 Seyon St. in Waltham, has the stripped-down quality of a colorful stage set in a black-box theater. Everything above your head is left exposed -- trusses, wiring, lighting -- the way it often is in such theaters. Down at your level there are thick, curving walls, painted in a silvery, ever-changing patina, which define the spaces for different activities without sealing them off.
The walls are made of ordinary plaster, but the rough-textured paint makes them resemble old stone or concrete. This, too, feels like a stage trick. There's a delightful play between the ruggedness of these silvery walls and the brightness of colors elsewhere. Walking around, you feel like an actor on a set. And the minimal modern furniture, in such bold surroundings, feels as temporary as that of a stage.
Other walls are made of glass, so you can look into the testing labs. ''We wanted people to see and hear us breaking steel beams," says Bell. Like the climbing wall in the architects' office, the Simpson space has a rappelling tower, so engineers can practice going up building facades to make inspections. Coffee points are at the edges, not the center, of the space, so you'll have to walk to them and hopefully run into a colleague.
The Novartis space has none of the Simpson's playfulness, but it, too, is about mixing people from different disciplines. It's housed in the huge old former Necco candy factory at 250 Massachusetts Ave. in Cambridge.
''Fifty years ago you could have a small lab where nobody saw anyone," says Novartis's Bernard Aebischer, global head of research facility operations. ''But now our research is highly interdisciplinary. We wanted eye contact between people in different fields." A cancer researcher today, Aebischer argues, can't work alone. ''He needs help from the computer guys and the robotics guys."
The architects, Stubbins Associates of Cambridge, accomplish that goal in a very different way from the solution at Simpson, Gumpertz. An enormous, six-story, skylighted atrium is carved out of the middle of the old building. Round glass elevators, shining in stainless steel, climb its sides. So do sweeping, curving staircases. Sensually curved balconies overlook it at every floor. The atrium is intended as Novartis's primary mixing chamber. Here workers from different parts of the complex can meet and interact.
The atrium, for me, is overly grand. If Simpson, Gumpertz is a black-box theater, Novartis is a sweeping Hollywood epic. It's too big and glitzy, like a Hyatt hotel, and you find yourself searching for the waterfall you're conditioned to expect in such a space.
But the atrium is nevertheless a handsome and bountiful gesture to the researchers who occupy the building's labs. It's something you've never seen in a science building until now.
As in the Simpson building, many of Novartis's labs feature glass walls so you can see what's going on. And wherever two corridors cross, there is what the architects call a ''bubble room," a circular glass conference space. When you're in it, you're in a fishbowl, visible from four directions down the corridors. It's another way of keeping people in touch.
Stubbins, it should be noted, did Novartis at a fantastic pace. From the architects' first sketch to the building's opening, it was only one year. Stubbins did the interior; the exterior, mostly renovation, is by Tsoi, Kobus.
As a side note, it's interesting to recall that at the opening of the original Necco factory -- the name stood for New England Confectionary Company -- the building was reviewed, in 1928, by a young professor named Alfred H. Barr Jr., soon to be the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Barr loved the Necco building for its clean, engineered look, its lack of extraneous architectural ornament. ''It will exist for the new generation," he wrote, ''not merely as a document in the growth of a new style, but as one of the most living and beautiful buildings in New England."
Two different jobs at different scales. Simpson, Gumpertz & Heger cost $3.4 million, and Novartis, when fully fitted out, cost about $200 million. Both buildings, in different ways, succeed in achieving the same goals.
Robert Campbell is the Globe's architecture critic. He can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.
