It was standing room only as Nobel Laureate Dr. James Watson and award winning architect William Grover, FAIA, explored their 36-year collaboration developing and improving the renowned research campus of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. The pair’s presentation, part of the Essex Library’s Centerbrook Architects Lecture Series, drew some 200 people to the Essex Meadows Auditorium last month.
As with any solid long term relationship, there were moments of tension through the years. “Bill, I never wanted to fire you,” Dr. Watson averred somewhat backhandedly to Centerbrook’s Partner Emeritus. “That’s not my recollection, Jim,” Mr. Grover replied, smiling. Most often, however, the pair concurred on what represented good architecture that was conducive to scientific inquiry into the causes of cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and other illnesses.
The campus they worked to create over four decades is the antithesis of a large, boxy, factory laboratory setting bristling with characterless buildings, macadam, and white-coated drones. It is a Village for Science, with intimate spaces indoors and out so researchers can bump into one another, conspire, perambulate, gossip, bird-watch, or meditate. One might mistake Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for a small, private day school or, as The New York Times reviewer saw it, a miniature Bavarian hilltop village.
Dr. Watson told the 200 people in attendance how he felt about the place where he has lived and worked since 1968, “I often think how lucky I am to be there.”