Paul's House Diary

Boston.com released a slide show of pics from the now open Koch Institute for Cancer Research in Kendall Square. This development is yet another GIGANTIC box taking up a whole  block in the very different, and increasingly interesting, Kendall corner of Cambridge. I’m not a fan of giant blocks – I think this approach is killing any hope for the Seaport, and smaller incremental development like the Legal’s Pier Project are going to be that area’s saving grace. But Kendall is so beyond smaller incremental developments, that giant labs and bio-tech boxes like this are the style du jour for the Square. This isn’t all bad, as I suspect there is nowhere else in the city, maybe the country and the world, where you truly feel like your walking in a strange 1980’s vision of the future, where almost no one is outside and the buildings are giant square blocks in a Tron-like grid. Even the building themselves kind of look like diodes on the hard-drive that is Kendall, especially that creepy one that resembles a giant German prison on the opposite side of the Marriot (I think it’s a government building too). Anyone whose been to the garment district probably knows what I’m talking about. What’s forming in Kendall is a transformation not into a more traditional urban environment, but instead an area with it’s own character, a feature lacking in the square in previous decades. Now there’s a certain variety to the giant blocks, as exemplified in the new Koch Center, and a little more of a sense of place, even if it is almost void of pedestrians and only on the cusp of urbanity. I like the cold cyber-future feel of the area every once in a great while when I find myself in that part of town. I’d probably never opt to live in Kendall (at least in its current state) but I can appreciate it for the purpose it serves – there’s not supposed to be street-life or urban density, everyone is busy inside curing cancer or writing algorithms – DON’T DISTRACT THEM!