With a Tuesday topping-off ceremony – in which a construction project’s final structural beam is raised into place – the Cambridge lab and arts building known as 585 Kendall is on track to be finished in 2026, said the BioMed Realty executive overseeing the project, Sal Zinno.
Exterior terra cotta panels for the three-tiered building start going up Monday. The tenant talking the bulk of the building’s square footage, Takeda, is expected to begin its fit-out in early summer and the core shell will be substantially complete in January 2026, Zinno said.
“Not everyone gets to do a 585,” said Zinno, who started at BioMed 16 years ago and “never expected to be here that long – [but] a 630,000-square-foot building with a theater at the base and 120-seat amphitheater? That stuff, and the color and the shape and all that, is really what makes what I do amazing. It’s not just commodity office product in the burbs.”
Along with Takeda’s move-in comes 30,000 publicly accessible square feet with a 400-seat theater; a 150-seat stage in a lobby with year-round garden; and “most importantly, a commons area on the ground floor where everyone will be welcomed,” said Connie Chin, chief executive of Global Arts Live and 585 Arts, the nonprofit programmer of the space.
The ceremony Tuesday on Third Street, in the heart of Cambridge’s Kendall Square, began in the open air in 15-degree temperatures.
A 44-foot iron beam rested on concrete barriers in front of the structure, quickly covered with signatures and scrawled good wishes by the gathered Suffolk construction workers, BioMed and Takeda executives and arts and community leaders such as the Cambridge Community Foundation’s Geeta Pradhan. The event drew state legislators, mayor E. Denise Simmons and city manager Yi-An Huang and city councillors Sumbul Siddiqui and Patty Nolan. Among the shivering crowd, many of whom ducked occasionally into a nearby lobby to warm up, only one person looked comfortable even without a jacket: state Sen. Sal DiDomenico – who grew up only blocks away, saw Kendall Square grow and is now Senate chair of the life-sciences caucus on Beacon Hill.
“We remember the days when Kendall Square was not the place it is today,” DiDomenico said. “I know what the life-sciences industry does for people firsthand. We are just so excited and so happy to see Takeda continue to grow in our neighborhood.”
After a series of photo ops in front of the signed beam, a bagpiper played Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” and cranes began lifting its 4,330 pounds. It was rested in place at the top of the future 558 Kendall and the ceremony attendees fled inside for brief speeches and lunch.
BioMed’s next project after 585 Kendall isn’t clear, but in public and private remarks Zinno made it clear why he has stayed in the city and why, in DiDomenico’s words, BioMed has “so many buildings in Cambridge they don’t even know how many they have.”
“I love this market. Working in Cambridge is incredible, and lends itself to being able to create a project like this,” Zinno said. He didn’t doubt there was a next one – BioMed is “always on the lookout” and acquired a few buildings in Cambridge recently that could be developed. (The company has been holding community meetings about a possible redevelopment at 320 Charles St., East Cambridge, a two-story lab building of 99,513 square feet bought in 2013 and leased to the Broad Institute as a processing facility. The site began as an Anheuser-Busch Co. bottling plant in the 1950s.)
Market problems that have put the brakes on projects in Cambridge and Somerville by developers such as Healthpeak and Asana is, for BioMed, only something to “keep a close eye on,” Zinno said. “It’s had an impact on what we build – we’re seeing a trend to buildings that have a higher percentage of lab. Your typical lab building is really a portion of office and a portion of lab; we’re seeing a line shift where some of our clients want to accommodate more scientists.”
Despite the broader trends hitting real estate and construction, Julie Kim, president of Takeda’s U.S. businesses, said that being able to gather its employees in one place was good for them and for the community.
“That building over there that’s going up, that’s going to be our new R&D tower [for] state-of-the-art equipment and labs to help accelerate the development of medicines,” Kim said. “Being able to bring everyone together here in Cambridge will allow us to collaborate and innovate even better.”
Kim agreed with Zinno that Cambridge and Kendall Square continues to be “the place to be.”
“There is no other place in the world where this ecosystem for life sciences exists. That is why we chose to be here and why we continue to choose to be here,” Kim said.
All materials for 585 Kendall have long been assembled – “the entire curtain wall is spread out in a yard in Canada and is going to come down by truck, it’s ready to go,” Zinno said – and safe from the effect of tariffs threatened to be implemented next month by the new Trump White House.
That means 585 Kendall is on track for a new public space and theater and for Takeda to take occupancy next year of the rest of the structure’s 16 stories.
“Complicated projects like this in the heart of the Innovation District truly take no time off, whether it’s days of extreme cold like today or torrential rains, extreme heat or whatever the conditions are,” Suffolk Construction chairman and chief executive John Fish said. “Our workers are here six days a week, 18 hours a day, ensuring the success of this world-class, state-of-the-art headquarters.”
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