Harvard’s enterprise Research Campus (Lower Allston, Western Ave)

✴︎

8.26.2025

Harvard has effectively been given a blank slate to develop their properties on Western Avenue in Allston. Like much of Boston, there’s no reality where this stretch of the city would be transformed into a new high spine of skyscrapers. To that end, this strip of former industrial rail yards and parking lots is abutted by dense, multifamily housing, whose residents have pushed for human-scale development from the deep-pocketed development team drawing up plans for the neighborhood.

What the Harvard development team has borne out, however, feels more behemoth than any of the new towers going up down the river in Back Bay or the Financial District.

Frankly, even the Seaport feels charming in comparison to the massive, multi-story LEGO sets Harvard is dropping in each of the mega-parcels the University owns along Western Ave.

Harvard basically had a canvas (and the means) to deploy some of the greatest urban design minds alive to build a 21st-century crown jewel of a campus here. Instead, their new neighborhood embraces every urban planning misstep in the catalogue, with massive development blocks and poor street-level interaction for every new parcel that begins construction.

Many of the buildings (like the new American Repertory Theater in Barry’s Corner) are institutional, and therefore get a bit of grace when it comes to being standalone monuments to their uses. But how did one of the most in-demand architecture firms in the country (Studio Gang) and the richest university on the planet join forces to create such a bland–if not outright ugly–collection of buildings?

The whole Enterprise Research Campus is still under construction, so it may not be fair to judge the endeavor so harshly so early. And while the timber-frame treehouse is ambitious in a trendy way, it “holds all of its cards” and communicates very little of its structural innovation on its pretty basic facade.

I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves; I’ve also included some non-Harvard landmarks in this roundup that you can find on Western that help to break up the scale a bit and harken back to the neighborhood’s “Rat City” roots.

This includes one of my fave PoMo buildings on Soldiers Field Road (below) and the awesome Art House that abuts the PRX garage and Aeronaut Brewery as you head toward Watertown.