Two new Drexel buildings bringing a livelier look to West Philly streets

West Philadelphia's big institutions worked for decades to cleanse their streets of any trace of indigenous urban life - and they very nearly succeeded. Along Market, Chestnut, and Walnut Streets, block after block fell to a generic, corporate style of architecture that favored block-long facades, daunting setbacks, and inscrutable, windowless walls. It was a scary place, indeed.

Having belatedly recognized the error of their ways, those institutions - Drexel University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University City Science Center - have been trying to repair the damage, punching in a new door here, installing a corner cafe there. The sanitized blocks, from the Schuylkill west to 38th Street, may never regain their original vibrancy, but at least they now bear some resemblance to their bustling Center City cousins.

Re-urbanization has not come easy, especially for Drexel. Although its recent academic buildings dutifully follow Philadelphia's traditional sidewalk line on Market Street, the architecture (all of it by big-name firms) is as introverted and lackluster as anything from the bad old '70s.

But with the completion this spring of a glassy recreation center at Market and 33d Streets, and a new science building rising on Chestnut Street, Drexel may finally be getting the hang of the urban thing. While the design isn't as polished as one might like, it achieves something that has eluded most of Drexel's recent architecture: It feels alive.

What the two buildings have in common, and what distinguishes them from the architecture of Drexel's unfortunate orange-brick period, is that they fill in critical street frontage that had been left fallow in a misguided effort to provide open space. Just as important, both reserve high-visibility spaces for public eateries, qualifying the projects as "mixed use."

The $44.6 million recreation center, designed by Boston's Sasaki Associates with local help from EwingCole, is the most dramatic example so far of Drexel's in-filling. The facility is an addition to Drexel's vaulted, orange-brick gym, which was completed in 1971 and turned a blank face to Market Street. Though the gym extension is modest in size, Drexel's late president, Constantine Papadakis, wanted it to signal the university's growing academic and architectural ambitions.