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The Architect: How to Design a Secure Facility

Imagine being able to layer security into your building the way you do the plumbing or wiring. Genzyme's Dave Kent doesn't have to imagine it-he got to do it.

May 01, 2003 — CSO — Glass. If there is just one word for The Genzyme Center in Cambridge, Mass., the word is glass. The biotech company's eponymous headquarters, scheduled to open next October, will bestow upon its neighborhood (which happens to be the heart of the biotech industry) a 12-story, shimmering glass soul.

Start with its skin: 1,495 glass panels. Some of these sections are mirrored, including a six-story square that faces west and serves as a brilliant riposte to the afternoon sun. Other sections are tinted but still expose the subcutaneous layer. There, behind a narrow promenade that circuits each floor, is more glass. Specifically, transparent glass walls sidled by transparent glass doors lead in to offices that have identical glass doors and walls on the opposite side. It's a 285,000-square-foot corporatarium. In certain spots, if you were washing windows, you could look right through the thing.

The architects at Behnisch, Behnisch and Partner say that they were trying to "encourage the often neglected or forgotten." By that, they mean natural light, of course; and their design encourages natural light the way fire encourages heat. As if there was a choice. But this story isn't about the architects.

The CEO and chairman of Genzyme, Henri Termeer, says the design is "from the inside out." He means the building takes a worker's perspective. Termeer also likes to assign warm and fuzzy corporate symbolism to the glass, its transparency and the light it lets in. But this story isn't about Termeer either.

This story is about Dave Kent, vice president and CSO, who, when he thinks about the glass, usually sighs. Or shrugs. Sometimes, he wanders around the neighborhood with a spotting scope, peering through the glass and pretending that a piece of key intellectual property is plainly visible on a computer screen in one of the fishbowl offices. Transparency, for Kent, isn't symbolism. It's a corporal weakness.

"Yeah, the glass is a headache," concedes Kent. "But the reality is you don't design a building for security. You secure the design of a building. I accept that. It's just nice to be able to play at this level."

Earlier, Kent had laid out the level at which he plays, right across his desk: blueprints for The Genzyme Center. Trying to read them was, for me, like trying to read music for the first time, but this much was clear: They are blueprints for security. They delineate placement of video surveillance. They show wiring for access systems. And they detail the design of the Security Operations Center (SOC), a unique room that deserves attention (and will get it later).