More widely admired off than on campus, the building brought architect Charles F. Rogers II to prominence and updated the prestige of a venerable Boston firm best known for designing Colonial Williamsburg. The aggressive display of mechanical elements along the roofline and fire stairs across the facade proclaim the practical priorities of the building program, which reorganized Wellesley's science curriculum. Yet the Brutalist concrete and brightly enameled steel are deployed in an intricately layered composition embracing trees and intended to evoke picturesque values. At the rear, joining the building to a remodeled 1920s Collegiate Gothic structure, is an atrium juxtaposing old and new in the lively manner of such contemporaneous projects as Quincy Market (
GC5
).