Limestone Jesus: The Second Coming
Now, no one is saying that this building is in any way better than the original Limestone Jesus- that would be sacrilege, but one can only assume that the non-glass surfaces in this rendering of the Robert A.M. Stern juggernaut— that will house Drexel University’s new LeBow College of Business— will indeed be the natural stone of choice for commanding facades: limestone. Whether this Stern building will engender the same frenzied buying and selling of apartments like 15 Central Park West remains to be seen, however, with this being an institutional building and having no residential units to speak of, equivalent consumer interest would be an uptick in college applications, no?
This West Philadelphia academic architectural one-upmanship is really heating up! Penn has the rather imposing Wharton Deathstar/Tower of Greed by Kohn Fox Pederson, and Drexel counters with this Stern blockbuster. Tod Williams Billie Tsien, Penn? Take some Diamond and Schmidt! Creating a new urban park from scratch? Well, that is pretty impossible to top. A new gym AND a sports bar by Sasaki Associates is a welcome consolation (nice showing Drexel, but we knew who was going to win this).
Garnering runner-up status notwithstanding, Drexel’s next foray into showcasing the university’s prominence and burgeoning LeBow brand looks on trend. The new building dwarfs the current Pearlstein Business Center and incorporates striking contemporary design with the structure’s linear vocabulary and glass towers. While the limestone portion itself does not create a traditional-contemporary sycophancy, the permanence and innate formidability of the stone brings relief and weight to what could have been an overly transparent and perceptibly bijou jewel box structure; that visual communication would certainly run contrary to the image an American business school would want to portray. The lobby also looks to have interesting treatment creating visual movement toward the campus quad. Hopefully similar attention will be made toward Market street. As a front door to campus, it would be wise to make a strong, elegant expression to those not entering the defensible spaces of Drexel’s urban heart.
Amen.
