[New2Fishtown]

Underwriting lab buildings is a tricky thing. The vast majority of companies that will occupy space in these buildings are startups or barely past that stage, aka they have no credit, haven't gone public, haven't ever made any money. That in and of itself is challenging in light of how you typically finance commercial space: you land high-credit tenants with some guaranteed ability to pay their rent. In the lab world, you're mostly dealing with unproven companies whose future may live or die on a future FDA approval or on the results of new science.

Second point is that labs themselves are outrageously expensive to build out. Hundreds of dollars per square foot, or easily breaking $1,000 psf or more depending on what's happening in that particular lab.

Both of these factors make designing something with lots of bells and whistles - particularly bells and whistles that create inefficient or unusable space within the building - a tall order. I don't have a deep knowledge of lab buildings in Boston or the Bay Area or SD, but from what I've seen I can't think of any that knock your socks off from a design standpoint. High quality materials? Absolutely. Handsome? Sure. But there isn't a lot of room for architectural showing off.