The Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex (ISEC) is a 234,000 square-foot (21,700 m
2)
building at
Northeastern University
Northeastern University (NU) is a private university, private research university with its main campus in Boston. Established in 1898, the university offers undergraduate and graduate programs on its main campus as well as satellite campuses in ...
designed for collaborative research, laboratory access, and classroom learning. The building is located on the University's central campus at 805 Columbus Ave, Boston, Massachusetts. The building initially opened on April 3, 2017.
In 2019 the building won an
AIA COTE Top 10 Award.
History
The Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex was first proposed in the 2012 Northeastern University Institutional Master Plan (IMP) draft as a three phase, two building cluster on the existing Columbus lot, a surface parking lot. In the final 2013 version of the document, the complex had been revised to be a three building cluster with an option for a fourth, connected to the main campus by a bridge known as "The Arc". The first building proposed to be constructed in the IMP was known as the Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Building (ISEB).
In April 2013, Payette was selected as the result of an open design contest to design the first phase of ISEC. Their design focused on an energy efficient building envelope, with a distinctive skin of fixed solar shielding reducing solar insolation. The first building received
Boston Planning & Development Agency
The Boston Planning & Development Agency (BPDA), formerly the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA), is a Massachusetts public agency that serves as the municipal planning and development agency for Boston, working on both housing and commercial de ...
Board approval in November 2013. The building, now referred to in documents as ISEC, officially broke ground in February 2014, with a scheduled completion date in 2016.
Suffolk Construction
Suffolk Construction Company stylized as Suffolk is an American construction contracting company based in Boston, Massachusetts with additional locations in California, Florida, New York and Texas. The company is contracted for work in the aviatio ...
was the primary contractor, with engineering provided by
Arup Group
Arup (officially Arup Group Limited) is a British multinational professional services firm headquartered in London which provides design, engineering, architecture, planning, and advisory services across every aspect of the built environment ...
and
Vanasse Hangen Brustlin.
The building was topped off in June 2016.
The building was materially complete and soft opened in January 2017. The official grand opening took place on April 4, 2017.
Researchers, students, faculty, administrators, and executives of various research institutions attended the grand opening along with a protesting student environmental group, DivestNU.
In 2018 the building was awarded the
Harleston Parker Medal
The Harleston Parker Medal was established in 1921 by J. Harleston Parker to recognize “such architects as shall have, in the opinion of the Boston Society of Architects
One of the oldest and largest chapters of the AIA, the Boston Society of ...
by the
Boston Society of Architects
One of the oldest and largest chapters of the AIA, the Boston Society of Architects (BSA) is a nonprofit membership organization committed to architecture, design and the built environment.
History
On June 20, 1867, approximately 50 architects co ...
, recognizing it as one of the most beautiful buildings in Boston.
Bridge
The rail corridor that serves Amtrak, the Orange Line, and commuter trains makes walking or biking from one side to the other difficult, effectively isolating Northeastern's main campus from the Roxbury neighborhood. To combat this issue, the designers of ISEC included a new public pedestrian bridge that extends from an ISEC to the central campus of Northeastern, with accommodations for pedestrians and cyclists. Construction of the 317 foot bridge began in Fall 2017 and was expected to finish in late 2018. The bridge was lifted into place in October 2018, a revised timeline stated the bridge would open in Q1 2019. The bridge opened to the public in June 2019. The bridge received critical acclaim for its unique
weathering steel
Weathering steel, often referred to by the genericised trademark COR-TEN steel and sometimes written without the hyphen as corten steel, is a group of steel alloys which were developed to eliminate the need for painting, and form a stable rus ...
design and lighting design. The bridge was seeking Envision certification from the
Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure, and received an Envision Bronze award for sustainable infrastructure in April 2020. The bridge received the 2020
Engineering News-Record
''Engineering News-Record'' (widely known as ''ENR'') is an American weekly magazine that provides news, analysis, data and opinion for the construction industry worldwide. It is widely regarded as one of the construction industry's most authori ...
New England Award of Merit for Bridges, and won a Design Honor award from the Boston Society of Landscape Architects.
EXP
The original 2013 Institutional Master Plan that proposed ISEC included three buildings in the complex. In May 2019, Northeastern proposed a single second building that would complete the complex, EXP, with plans to begin construction in early 2020. The 350,000 sq ft new building is anticipated to take three years to complete and will include dynamic research spaces for driverless cars and humanoid robots. The building was approved by the Boston Planning and Development Agency in October 2019. Construction began in early 2020, but was delayed due to the
COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...
. Construction continued in August 2020. The building is estimated to cost $218,245,000.
Design
ISEC has 6 stories consisting of labs, classrooms, offices, conference rooms, and research facilities. The first floor consists of two 50-seat lecture halls, two 50-seat active learning classrooms, a bicycle storage room, a 24-seat biomaterials teaching lab, a cafe, and a 280-seat auditorium. The building also has a central atrium which extends through all 6 floors and contains the main spiral staircase. Floors 2-5 house an array of experimental labs on the rectangular half of the building and contain offices and conference rooms on the rounded half of the building across the atrium. The 6th floor is structurally similar to floors 2–5, but house computational research facilities in place of the laboratories. The north corner of floors 3-6 contain a computational research room, and floor 2 has a lab classroom in the same corner.
The ISEC building was constructed for collaboration and research. The central body of the building consists of a large atrium that extends from the ground floor to the six-story ceiling. Much of the research space which borders this main atrium is completely visible to observers, allowing for high levels of transparency between the public and different disciplines. Open spaces of collaboration and "research on display" define much of the complex.
ISEC was constructed on an urban brownfield site that was formerly a parking lot set between the Columbus Ave and Renaissance Park Garages. The building achieved a
LEED Gold
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) is a
green building certification program used worldwide. Developed by the non-profit U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), it includes a set of rating systems for the design, construction ...
certification in 2018, using 78% less energy than a traditional lab building. The building also has a rainwater retention system that harvests rainwater and uses it to supply 57% of the flushing needs in the building.
Influence and impact
The Boston Globe noted that the completion of the ISEC facility was the culmination of a major shift in the culture, history, and trajectory of Northeastern University. In the past ten years, the university's federal research funding has more than doubled, to the current $130 million a year, and Northeastern has hired 565 new tenured and tenure-track faculty in disciplines directly tied to its research goals since the 2006–2007 academic year.
The ISEC building represented a $225 million piece of the $1.6 billion master plan for development proposed by Northeastern to the Boston Planning & Development Agency in November 2013.
The complex has housed a variety of major research projects. The Human-centered robotics research group develops robots and assistive devices. In partnership with NASA, researchers are programming a 6’2” humanoid, Valkyrie, to explore Mars as soon as 2030, ahead of human explorers. This project represents a collaborative effort between Northeastern University,
University of Massachusetts Lowell
The University of Massachusetts Lowell (UMass Lowell and UML) is a public research university in Lowell, Massachusetts, with a satellite campus in Haverhill, Massachusetts. It is the northernmost member of the University of Massachusetts public u ...
, and NASA's
Johnson Space Center
The Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC) is NASA's center for human spaceflight (originally named the Manned Spacecraft Center), where human spaceflight training, research, and flight control are conducted. It was renamed in honor of the late U ...
.
References
External links
Payette Project PageBLDUP Construction Photos
{{Northeastern University
Northeastern University buildings
School buildings completed in 2017
Buildings and structures in Boston
Modernist architecture in Massachusetts
2017 establishments in Massachusetts