A Beautiful Mess in America's Petri Dish

While Kendall Square companies are building expensive, sometimes over-sanitary headquarters that begin to look a little glam for these corners, some say the primordial spirit of the place can't be swept away.
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Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with neighboring Harvard and MIT, has a long, winding and wild place in American history. Home to some of the best and brightest in the area it is also still home to a burgeoning housing debate, scrappy startups and messy ideas. With the intrigue over who will get the Volpe transportation building and it's 14-acre site, shiny new restaurants, cafes and designer buildings by top-shelf names, one might think the grit and experimentation has been swept away, but that's just never been the reality here. In fact, the whole area seems to thrive on having a permission slip for risk, failure and experimentation. Tenants some, like ArtScience Prize founder, David Edwards who has recently expanded his creativity lab from Paris to Kendall Square, argue are the tent poles for creativity.

Before Kendall Square became one of the most important industrial centers of the 19th century and a modern day tech hatchery to rival Silicon Valley, the area was a modest salt marsh along the Charles River. Disorder rules the place. During the space race, it was Bostonian President John F. Kennedy's first choice for the NASA Mission Control Center. Lyndon B. Johnson opted for Houston as its headquarters instead. But that didn't stop the innovation.

Tim Rowe, the unofficial mayor of Kendall Square, and founder of the Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) told me in a past interview, "Probably the three biggest inventions in the last five hundred to a thousand years would be the computer, the telephone and the Internet and they were all invented within a mile of here." Longtime Cambridge resident, George Whitehead, recently explained to me an idea he had heard about in urban planning. Cities that get "hot" every 50 to 100 years, stay relevant. And today, from Harvard Square to Central Square to Kendall Square, Cambridge is experiencing a historic boom. The amount of brainpower and activity underway these days is staggering. Life science companies (Biogen, Novartis, BaxAlta Labs and Genzyme) and innovation heavyweights (Google, Microsoft, Amazon) have all taken up residence, joining academic institutions like Harvard, MIT, Mass General Hospital and the Broad Institute, in a race to research and develop big ideas into game changing products.

The intellectual and financial capital involved here right now is mind-blowing. Yet, much like the many breakthrough ideas that emerge and jean-and-slacker-dressed intellectuals who work and live here, Kendall Square is bright, brilliant, invigorating and very, very messy.

In an effort to celebrate all of this creativity, Boston and Cambridge will engage in a week of events this October called HUBweek. It's an opportunity to shine a light on the people and places that are pushing the envelope, and make them accessible to the public. And Kendall Square is the poster-child of that innovation.

As part of HUBweek, our upstart media company, TheEditorial.com, has gathered several leaders in the worlds of art and science who will be illuminated in Google's new campus to dissect creativity, failure, and idea development. David Edwards (Le Laboratoire, Paris and Cambridge), Sally Taylor (Consenses.org), Janet Echelman (Urban Airspace Artist) and Tim Rowe (CIC, one of Kendall's most important incubators) will share their perspectives during an immersive conversation called "Creating Something Out of Nothing." And to create this digital immersion, RISD-bred founder of IlluminusBoston, Jeff Grantz, will transform an unexpected and unusual venue to make the point of how it is possible to start with nothing and create something that matters for all.

And while Kendall Square companies are building expensive, sometimes over-sanitary headquarters that begin to look a little glam for these corners, some say the primordial spirit of the place can't be swept away. Because what is valued most on this left bank marsh is the ideas and the bumping up of street artists against writers against scientists who are trying to measure gravitational waves or the next drone, against the academics pushing the classics as the compass. Therein lies the messiness of Kendall Square. And as a writer, watching this moment in time is propitious because groundbreaking ideas are more likely to come from a real petri-dish of a place, and we are all likely to get a lot smarter and creative because of it.

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