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.