Low brick mill buildings stand beside new glass laboratory towers along a canal basin, and American Hustle used the Barker Engineering Library at MIT for its Senate hearing scenes.
What Kendall Square looks like
Main Street and Broadway meet at the Kendall/MIT Red Line stop, where wide streets carry office traffic past level crossings on the Grand Junction rail line. Ames Street runs between exposed brick loft buildings and glass fronted labs, a delivery truck and parked cars at the kerb.
The building is a low brick survivor at Binney and Third Streets, one storey against the towers that now surround it. Along Broadway and Main, five and six storey brick mill blocks from the 1880s to the 1910s carry repeating window bays and loading doors, their ground floors now fronted with lab and tech company signage.
The runs about 1,000 feet from the Charles River to a public boardwalk behind the , a yellow brick power plant built in 1948 with its stack over the water. 's office and lab buildings line Broadway on the far side, their scale closer to the new towers than to the boiler company's low brick shed.
South toward MIT, the newest lab towers run in glass curtainwall to fourteen storeys and higher, ground floor retail wrapped around older brick at the base. At , a five storey brick clocktower building from the early 1900s sits beneath a fourteen storey glass tower completed in 2021, the two joined at the sidewalk.
Shot in Kendall Square
American Hustle turned the Barker Engineering Library at MIT into a U.S. Senate hearing room. The scene sits under the library's rotunda, on the MIT campus at the western edge of Kendall Square.
American Hustle, 2013
Played a U.S. Senate hearing room, Washington, D.C., 1970s
The rotunda reading room under the Great Dome, ringed by Corinthian columns and arched windows, stood in for the hearing chamber. Study carrels and reading lamps sit under the dome today. Street View
A converted Victorian granary building sits beside new glass offices along Regent's Canal, the same pairing Kendall Square has at the Broad Canal. Both areas hold biotech and tech company headquarters near the water. King's Cross reads older in its brick detailing and the canal towpath is wider, so a tighter frame on a single glass tower against brick reads closer to Kendall Square than a wide canal shot does. Try searching converted granary building now.
South Lake Union in Seattle, Washington
Amazon's glass headquarters towers rise beside older brick warehouse buildings that survive from South Lake Union's industrial years, the same new glass beside old brick pairing Kendall Square shows along Broadway. The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center sits a block from the towers, another biotech anchor next to new construction. South Lake Union's warehouses sit lower and further from the towers than Kendall Square's mill buildings do, so a shot needs both in frame together for the comparison to hold. Try searching brick warehouse building now.
