The Boston University Photonics Center is a building and research center owned by Boston University. The 10-floor 235,000 sq ft (21,800 m2) building opened in June 1997, finished at a cost of $78.4 million. The center specializes in developing and commercializing new products for the photonics industry, spanning the fields of biomedical engineering, nanoscience, physics, astronomy, and chemistry. The two lowest floors include classroom and lab spaces used by the College of Engineering; a number of engineering faculty also have their offices and research labs in the building.
The Photonics Center is located adjacent to the 8-lane Mass Pike and the busy Framingham/Worcester commuter rail line, which create noise and vibration that unmitigated would be disruptive to lectures and experiments. The steel frame of the building is founded on a reinforced concrete mat to minimize vibrations, while the above ground windows have a 1-inch airspace between window panes to block ambient sound from the highway.
Famous quotes containing the words boston, university and/or center:
“Any balance we achieve between adult and parental identities, between children’s and our own needs, works only for a time—because, as one father says, “It’s a new ball game just about every week.” So we are always in the process of learning to be parents.”
—Joan Sheingold Ditzion, Dennie, and Palmer Wolf. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 2 (1978)
“Fowls in the frith,
Fishes in the flood,
And I must wax wod:
Much sorrow I walk with
For best of bone and blood.”
—Unknown. Fowls in the Frith. . .
Oxford Book of Short Poems, The. P. J. Kavanagh and James Michie, eds. Oxford University Press.
“Everything that explains the world has in fact explained a world that does not exist, a world in which men are at the center of the human enterprise and women are at the margin “helping” them. Such a world does not exist—never has.”
—Gerda Lerner (b. 1920)