The John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center was founded in 1970 to advance transportation innovation for the public good, and its new building in

, Massachusetts—designed and engineered by SOM—furthers this critical mission. Conceived as a vertical campus, this building brings the entirety of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Volpe Center under one roof, with laboratories, data centers, offices, and amenities that were once spread across several structures. After five decades of operation within a fenced campus in the Kendall Square neighborhood, the U.S. DOT Volpe Center is now finally part of the public realm, in a structure that achieves a high level of building performance.

The center’s original, 14-acre campus had been intended for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration before the space agency settled in Houston, and in recent years, the facilities grew outdated. To realize a new headquarters, the General Services Administration entered an unprecedented land agreement with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Investment Management Company, which developed the building on four acres in exchange for the remaining 10 acres of campus land.

For decades, the center had been colloquially known as “the best-kept secret in

,” a gated setting where cutting-edge research took place. Yet the work of the center fit perfectly with the identity of Kendall Square, an entrepreneurial neighborhood driven by technological innovation. For the new, 410,000-square-foot building, SOM empowered the U.S. DOT Volpe Center to reveal itself, and its work, to the streetscape for the first time.