Massachusetts

Erected in 1929 to designs by Charles Coolidge of Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch and Abbott, this romantic, medievalist, pink granite, random-ashlar confection was donated to St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church by Frances Crane Lillie, a Chicago-born manufacturing heiress whose husband, Frank R. Lillie, was the long-time Director of the nearby Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL). Mrs.

MIT’s hub for nanoscale research is a cutting-edge facility that incorporates hundreds of overlapping building systems to precisely maintain air cleanliness, temperature, humidity, noise, and vibration—all in curtainwall exterior that puts the research occurring within on display. Wilson Architects (now Wilson HGA) likens the project to building “a Ferrari engine under a glass hood.” Nanoscience is the study of matter at nanoscale dimensions, that is, one-billionth of a meter (for context, a single human hair is approximately 80,000–100,000 nanometers wide).

Northeastern University’s Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex (ISEC) is one of Payette’s Building Science Group’s most noteworthy building designs. Built on an urban brownfield site, the six-story structure is defined by its curvilinear translucent facade with vertically oriented brise-soleils.

Designed by the KPMB Team of Canada, Boston University’s Center for Computing & Data Sciences is a significant sign of the university’s commitment to its leadership on climate action. This 19-story tower is one of the leading “fossil-free buildings” in the city and its profile— a series of cantilevered volumes that rise 92 meters in height—has become iconic within the surrounding urban landscape. The cantilevered design offers green terraces and rainwater retention.    

Connecting the lower Allston neighborhood to the greater Boston area and its public park system, Harvard University’s Science and Engineering Complex is a recent example of this research-based, pioneering academic institution’s leadership in 21st-century sustainable design. The main design goals were to create a healthier ecosystem, to increase biodiversity within the building site, and to support interdisciplinary scientific projects and collaborations.

The Robert Hutchings Goddard Library at Clark University represents one of John M. Johansen’s most successful attempts to fuse the rugged Brutalist aesthetic of raw concrete and brick infill, derived from the late work of Le Corbusier, with the visionary ideas of Archigram and the Metabolists.

Shawmut Station is one of the few, if only, stations on the Red Line with its original subway structure still in use. Shawmut opened as part of the second extension phase of the Cambridge-Dorchester Line (now known as the Red Line), moving south from the commercial core of Boston. The first extension phase had moved north into Cambridge the decade before. Located in a more suburban neighborhood of Dorchester, a section of the city proper located south of the downtown core, it sits on a paved expanse nestled among a collection of two- and three-story residences.

The architecture of the T can be characterized by heterogeneity, with design largely responding to neighborhood character and sites; however, certain aesthetics can be linked to specific eras of the MBTA and, within those eras, particular extensions. Porter Station is exemplary as a prototype—the first newly designed and constructed subway station to open as part of the Northwest Expansion.

The historic and contemporary subway structures of Kendall/MIT Station reflect the necessity of the stop as an access point to this industrial Cambridge neighborhood. Opened in 1912 as part of the first extension phase of the Cambridge-Dorchester Line (now known as the Red Line), the original station shepherded workers to a grittier Kendall. In the twenty-first century, Kendall remains an area with more workplaces than residences, and the station is a commuter gateway.