Volpe Transportation Center Development | Kendall Sq | Cambridge

It’s NYC’s PSAC II, but less committed to the bit.

PSAC-II-1.jpg
 
393b40 said:
Hah. I'm not a fan of this building at all..., the whole treatment is just so sterile. Let's hope the rest of the Volpe redevelopment makes us forget about this thing.
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This one's going to be a matter of taste. In my opinion it's the best new office building in Kendall. It looks like it was designed by actual architects with vision and follow-through. Federal buildings will always be sterile.
 
Equilibria said:
This one's going to be a matter of taste. In my opinion it's the best new office building in Kendall. It looks like it was designed by actual architects with vision and follow-through. Federal buildings will always be sterile.
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I remember when forumer cca (where is cca by the way? haven't seen posts from them in years) used to talk about how 101 Seaport was the building in that neighborhood with the best architecture. It was a contentious claim because it's arguably the most 'boring' building in the seaport. But I agree there too: so clean and designed-to-need. No extraneous flab. Not trying to do too much at once. And extremely high quality materials. I see the same at play here.
 
393b40 said:
Hah. I'm not a fan of this building at all..., the whole treatment is just so sterile. Let's hope the rest of the Volpe redevelopment makes us forget about this thing.
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It's a monolith...great for monuments, bad for buildings that humans are forced to look at.
 
It looks extremely national/federal government. Like, it could be at home in an embassy row in an alpha-tier global city. I suppose that's an upgrade to Boston and Cambridge's beta-tier global cities ranking.
 
as02143 said:
It looks extremely national/federal government. Like, it could be at home in an embassy row in an alpha-tier global city. I suppose that's an upgrade to Boston and Cambridge's beta-tier global cities ranking.
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Cambridge is full of betas, I'll give you that. Additionally, this building is a lumpy vanilla dump.
 
I'll put this here, only because of past discussions in this thread about the federal Dept. of Transportation / GSA making design decisions to shield some of what goes on in Volpe from snooping eyes and ears.

.... the France-based company worries that two new [condo] towers proposed by the developer Tenblock — just a few hundred metres away, at 1875 Steeles Ave. W. — could jeopardize its security. Each tower would be more than 30 storeys high.

"The location of hundreds of new residential units with a 24/7 overlook of its sensitive facilities undermines Sanofi's ability to ensure its ongoing and expanding vaccine research and manufacturing facilities are secure," reads a letter from Sanofi's lawyers to city planners.

And that, the letter continues, "represents national security concerns given the strategic importance of the site for vaccine manufacturing and future pandemic readiness."
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sanofi-drawing.jpg

The proposed condos in north Toronto.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/sanofi-pasteur-pharmaceutical-condo-1.6322453

From the article, it does appear that this corporate 'nimbyism' will be successful, and no construction permit unless the towers' height is slashed.

Important to note that this apparently is a vaccine production facility, not a research laboratory. But prospectively, the critical-to-national-security argument could be applied to certain types of pharmacological research as well. And this 'nimbyism' is likely a reaction / over-reaction(?) to the militancy of some anti-vaxxers.
 
It’s probably not the anti-vaccination crowd. It’s more likely to be fears of nation state espionage regarding production data or processes.
 
I think the building is impressively dynamic without beating you over the head with it (like Gerhy’s Stata Center, e.g.) It looks different from every point of view and it changes throughout the day as it moves through the light, becoming brightly illuminated with bold stripes that pop or it’s dark and flat and recedes into the backdrop. It does all this with a very limited material pallet and very simple form.
 
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