Changing Skyline: Biology central

Was it only three years ago that Radar Magazine crowned Drexel University the "ugliest campus" in a roundup of American colleges? The charge seemed a bit unfair then, even if Market Street was still ablaze with Drexel's orange-brick relics. But it's clearly wrong today.

Driven by the revved-up agenda of its late president, Constantine Papadakis, Drexel has cleaned up nicely in the last few years. The university has added several distinctive dormitories, camouflaged its orange-brick gym with a gossamer glass wall, and brought an important building by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown into the campus fold.

The latest evidence that Drexel has moved to a higher tier, architecturally speaking, may be the very fine biology building about to open at the corner of 33d and Chestnut Streets. As a parent who spent the past year traipsing across dozens of college campuses (it felt like dozens, anyway) with an aspiring astrophysicist, I can report that the new Papadakis Integrated Sciences Building holds its own against any of the deluxe new labs I saw in my travels. It gets extra credit for doing so on a tough urban corner.

It's no accident that the exterior of the $69 million building is covered with limestone. It's an ambitious reference to the pale terra-cotta on Drexel's original home, the historic, Renaissance-style Main Building, two blocks east.

While that building celebrates engineering, the Papadakis is a paean to biology. You see it the moment you step into the atrium - another reference to Main - where a coiled stair evokes DNA's double helix and an 80-foot-high wall of plants serves as a living air filter. Natural light laps at the space. You could spend a day inside and not feel the least sun-deprived.

There is hardly a college today that isn't rushing to build its own version of Papadakis. We're living in a Sputnik moment, but for biology. Thanks to the huge interest in public health, the human genome project, and the effects of climate change, biology departments have secured big money from donors to construct temples to science.

The Papadakis building is a manifestation of that trend. Drexel's biology department was working out of decrepit labs in a 1950s, orange-brick (of course) building that didn't have air-conditioning. Some labs even lacked windows - not the best environment for running a temperature-sensitive experiment.