Start here, in the atrium.

Take in the Milton Atrium, the $6-million hub of the $107-million Life Sciences Complex, a symbol wrapped within a symbol. Silver pillars rise three stories high against a brick wall backdrop. Blue-and-white rectangular prism light fixtures hang from the ceiling. Inside, there are places to sit and talk, and a cafe that sells coffee and fruit smoothies. Outside, silver lamps illuminate the just-planted gingko and sassafras trees.

The atrium is the centerpiece of the largest and most expensive building project in Syracuse University history. The atrium connects the new 107,000-square-foot building with the old Center for Science and Technology. It connects the biology, chemistry and biochemistry departments, the keys of the life sciences.

The new building symbolizes the university’s commitment to progress, its creators say, and the atrium symbolizes how it plans to make progress: Collaboration. Interdisciplinary work. Science as a social activity.

Schools like Vanderbilt University and the University of Chicago have buildings that emphasize collaboration. Science is moving this way. So Syracuse will move this way.

Now look up, two stories above. There’s Cathy Newton, the former dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, looking over the atrium. All of this, she will tell you, is part of a plan. She helped organize much of this building, from its academic design to the saplings out front to the terra cotta ceramics that coat the building.

‘We wanted it to feel warm,’ Newtown said. ‘We wanted to draw people in. You know, the stereotype of science is locking people out. We need to draw people in.’

The Life Sciences Complex will be formally dedicated on Friday at 3:30 p.m. But the building has been open since August, teeming with life.

The new building houses the entire biology department under one roof, a break from the fragmented past. Faculty members get brand new research and teaching laboratories, replacing the archaic facilities at the Biological Research Labs, Bowne Hall and Lyman Hall.

‘This is where the most pressing, really urgent need is,’ Newton said. Biology and chemistry needed to be closer together. Science has never been Syracuse’s thing. The S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications is the university’s marquee brand, the ‘name’ with alums like Bob Costas and Ted Koppel. The Martin J. Whitman School of Management opened a new home in 2005. And the Maxwell School of Public Affairs and Citizenship has cache: The graduate public affairs program ranks first in the country, according to U.S. News & World Report.

The life sciences have not reached that level. The graduate biology program ranks 89th in the country, according to U.S. News & World Report. The graduate chemistry program ranks 81st.

This building aims to change that.

The new Life Sciences Complex, faculty members say, will improve the school. It will strengthen research. It will attract elite faculty and more students.

‘We can attract not only good undergraduate students, but we can attract stronger graduate students,’ said John Russell, the chair of the biology department. ‘For the same sorts of reasons, we’ll have stronger faculty that attracts stronger graduate students. And stronger faculty means the scientific prominence of Syracuse University will increase.’

In the early 2000s, when this building and this atrium were still in limbo, Syracuse faced a question.

‘And the question was, ‘Is Syracuse going to invest in and be an increasingly comprehensive university?” Newton said. ”Or will it continue to be a place that invests only in a couple of spots?”

The university chose the first option.

‘And so this is really a key turning point in the history of the institution,’ Newton said.

***

Back in 1992, when he became chancellor, Buzz Shaw understood two things about the SU and the life sciences. First, he said, he was pleased with the level of progress. But second, and more importantly, he knew the departments needed better space. The labs at BRL, Bowne and Lyman were too old and too cramped.

By the mid-1990s, Shaw had fixed the financial cataclysm he inherited. The university was ready to build. Shaw enlisted Lou Marcoccia, executive vice president and chief financial officer, and Debbie Freund, then-vice president and provost, to craft a plan for expanding the university.

The university-wide building plan was ambitious. It included Newhouse III and the new Management building. New space for the biology and chemistry departments fit in, too.

‘Any major research university that doesn’t have good facilities in science and technology really can’t call itself a university,’ Shaw said. The facilities he inherited were ‘inadequate for the research purposes of a major university.’ Improvements were necessary.

Then things get hazy, a morass of paperwork and proposals. Potential sites were analyzed. Reports were commissioned. Years passed, with stagnant progress.

In 2002, Shaw asked the Board of Trustees for new space. The Board approved. Shaw asked then-Dean Newton if she could commit to guiding the construction. She agreed. Newton coordinated both fundraising and the building’s design. ‘It’s extremely important,’ Shaw said. ‘Somebody has to own the building.’

To help with that, Larry Wolf, a professor of biology, served as the project shepherd. Wolf – like many others who devoted hours upon hours to the project – was lured by the magnitude of the building. These opportunities don’t come around often. Even for someone like Wolf, who has spent 41 years at Syracuse.

‘I think I’ve been a good teacher, a pretty good researcher,’ Wolf said. ‘But this building, getting it done and getting it more or less the way people really wanted it to be, I think is a real important thing to do.’

Wolf was the liaison between the faculty, the administration, the construction companies and the architects.

Oh yes, the architects. From late 2002 to early 2003, the university sifted through a series of firms. Syracuse settled on Ellenzweig, a Boston-based firm that built buildings at the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The academics met the architects in June 2003. They gathered together in the biology department’s conference room in Lyman Hall, the first of multiple all-day sessions.

The folks from Ellenzweig told the scientists to draw up a plan for their dream building. Spare no expense.

Around this time, John Russell spoke up. Russell, the biology chair, came to Syracuse in 1999. He joined up with the promise that his new department would get new space.

‘I know we can’t have the building of our dreams,’ Russell said at the time. ‘Isn’t this a waste of time? And isn’t it setting us up for disappointment?’

Russell was right. On both accounts.

The initial estimate was about $165 million, more than twice what the university allotted. Dreams, after all, are expensive.

That was a low for Jon Zubieta, the chair of the chemistry department. Progress stagnated again.

‘There were some dark times,’ Zubieta said. ‘There were some times when we were $80 million over budget and we had to come up with a new plan. People were tearing their hairs.’

But they are scientists. Failure happens all the time in their business. Solutions are what count. So they reduced costs and upped fundraising.

To cut cost, the building got smaller. The dream met reality. The footprint of the building was reduced by about 25 to 30 percent. Labs and teaching spaces were removed. The new greenhouse shrunk. The building lost its vivarium, a place to store animals for experiments. A three-story, underground parking garage was moved above ground to Adams Street. An underground tunnel was axed. The complex has only one loading dock, found in the back of Sci-Tech. All deliveries to Life Sciences must be carted across the atrium.

To raise funds, the school used an approach with several prongs. Syracuse applied for both large state and federal loans. It also reached out to foundations and individuals for donations.

Eventually, costs and fundraising met halfway. The building’s price settled at $107 million.

Dean Newton was a guiding force during this period, said Zubieta, the chemistry chair.

‘Without Cathy Newton, it’s unlikely that this building ever would have come about,’ Zubieta said. ‘She deserves a lot of the credit for having the persistence and the courage to keep at it.’Construction began in April 2006.

***

Cathy Newton moves away from the balcony and walks down a flight of white-tiled steps. She has keys that open almost every door in the building. She greets most everyone she passes: students, faculty, workers.

The building is stratified. Lower-level courses are on the lower levels of the complex. As you go higher up, classes become tougher, research more complex, details more finite. But the floor designs mirror each other. Once you know a little about the building, you know a lot.

Newton turned a corner and pointed at a sign on the laboratory door – ‘If you want to look at the bones, please see Dr. Swoot.’ She laughed. She laughs often when she talks about paleontology, her background field and her language of choice. Newton arrived at Syracuse in 1983, the ‘de-glacial phase,’ she called it. ‘The ice was just receding.’

The Center for Science and Technology opened in 1988, and the chemistry research labs moved there. But classrooms were still a problem. More than two decades after Newton came to campus, the instructional labs in Bowne Hall and Lyman Hall were still used. Both halls were built in 1907.

Karin Ruhlandt-Senge, a chemistry professor and member of the building committee, taught her first Bowne class on the top floor, in a cramped corner lab. Old equipment was strewn about. The room was dark and she couldn’t see every student. The ventilation was poor. There were no windows. And the room was loud. Ruhlandt-Senge would lose her voice shouting over the noise.

‘It was horrible,’ Ruhlandt-Senge said. ‘I think there’s no other way to put it. It was just disgusting. It was dirty. It was noisy. It was horrible to teach in.’

Biology had similar problems. Marvin Druger, the famed biology professor with the ubiquitous cardboard cut-out, taught his introductory biology class as basically a tutorial, using headphones and workbooks. The department wasn’t able to fit 800 students into a lab.

Back outside the laboratory door, Newton walked toward the solution. She passed sparkling new laboratories, the kind with clean sightlines that chemistry professor Nancy Totah calls ‘fantastic’ and ‘modernized.’

Newton rounded another corner and went down a corridor of steps. She was now in the front of the building. She opened the double doors to a new 250-seat auditorium with wood and light fixtures upholstered on the walls.

‘I come in here, and I wish the chairs were brighter,’ Newton said. ‘But I also feel that almost anybody coming in here would feel as if the university had invested in them. That’s what we were looking for.’

***

Oh, how Ramesh Raina loathed the Biological Research Laboratories.

Raina left Pennsylvania State University for Syracuse in 2003. Like many others recruited in the past seven or eight years, Raina said he would not have come to SU without the promise of the new building. Raina, a plant microbiologist, wanted to join a burgeoning program and continue his research with the sensory systems of plants.

Except, well, his plants kept dying.

See, Raina couldn’t use the greenhouse at BRL. When he first came to campus, biology department Chair John Russell showed it to him.

‘We have a greenhouse here,’ Russell said.

‘Where is it?’ Raina said.

‘On the rooftop.’

They went up to the roof of BRL. Raina took a look at the facility.

‘This is not a greenhouse,’ he said.

The greenhouse did not maintain temperature or humidity, Raina said. It kept plants hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It was useless.

So the department converted a couple rooms in BRL into a plant storage area for Raina. Those didn’t help much either – his plants still died. That set his research back six months at a time.

Faculty members used to complain to Dean Newton about their troubles. Labs flooded. Mold from the ceiling tiles contaminated cell cultures.

Not only that, the biology department was divided. At least chemistry research was all housed in Sci-Tech. Biology wasn’t as lucky. Some professors were based in BRL. Others were based in Lyman.

‘Syracuse wants this to be called a national research university,’ Raina said. ‘Go to any national research university. This place was a dump. It is shocking to see what we were living with.

‘Again, I will say that this place is not a luxury. People think that a new life sciences building is a big luxury to the life sciences people. It’s not true. If you go across the country, that’s how they are.’

Now, Raina doesn’t have those problems. Earlier this semester, he moved into a laboratory on the fourth floor.

The market for grants and funding is becoming more and more byzantine, Raina said. Proposals have become more complex. And with the economy slumping, there is less money to go around. The life sciences departments need to have modern equipment and colleagues nearby.

The new labs are connected. If you open a door, you create a double lab. Raina is closer to collaborators in information technology and computer science. He again has his own special room to store plants – one that gasp! works – plus a rooftop greenhouse that – gasp! works, too.

Said Raina: ‘It’s a whole new world.’

***

Cathy Newton entered a first-floor elevator and pressed ‘4.’

‘You finish a project like this, and immediately you think about other things you could do,’ Newtown said. ‘It’s the nature of things.’

Newtown walked out of the elevator and down a hallway corridor. She officially stepped down as dean after the 2007-2008 school year. She keeps an office here on the fourth floor, tucked in a corner with a group of biology professors. She spends her mornings writing a book, a study of shipwrecks along the Eastern seaboard.

She comes in most afternoons, a chance to take in the building she helped build. Her office is neither large nor small. Seashells sit on her desk. A map book titled ‘Oceanographic Atlas of the Carolina Continental Margin’ takes up about half the top of a long filing cabinet.

The book kept afloat after completing the building and leaving the deanship, a new project for someone always searching for projects.

Newton said she looks forward to sharing some brief remarks at the building’s dedication on Friday. Chancellor Nancy Cantor and new Arts and Sciences Dean George Langford are also scheduled to speak. Each speaker will get about five minutes, said Judy Holmes, spokesperson for Arts and Sciences.

Last Friday afternoon, Newton sat in her office, working on a database on her book. She walked into the hallway and saw the area flooded with people.

Ramesh Raina’s research team took up one conference room. Biology professor Kari Seagrave’s team took up another. Fingers click-click-clicked on laptop keyboards. A student drew equations on a whiteboard.

It was 4:35 p.m. On a Friday. The teams were just getting started.

Newton smiled.

‘That,’ she said, ‘is the measure of success.’

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Published on November 5, 2008 at 12:00 pm