Harvard would build two office-slash-lab buildings totaling about 400,000 square feet each, a hotel and conference center, and an apartment building on 14 acres along Western Avenue in Allston under plans the university spelled out November 29.
The Cambridge-based school has long planned to build big on its 36-acre Allston footprint just over the Charles River. Some plans are already coming to fruition. The plans for the 14 acres along Western Ave. are still very much on the drawing board.
Still, the new details are the sharpest yet for that parcel. The buildings would run from 140 feet to 190 feet in height, for instance, and would have retail and other commercial space on the ground floors.
The proposal is part of Harvard’s apparently grand vision for the area. A planning official for the university put it this way at that November 29 unveiling: “We’re not talking about creating an office park. We’re talking about an urban living space.”
Or, as CommonWealth’s Bruce Mohl put it, “building a new neighborhood.”
That neighborhood—dubbed Allston North or the Enterprise Research Campus in some circles—is also due to include features such as a 50-foot-wide promenade running down the middle, significant open space, and a 500,000-square-foot engineering-and-applied sciences complex.