John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center / Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

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 Cambridge, 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.