A look inside the new Integrated Science Center

When it comes to honest wear and tear on academic real estate, it’s hard to beat a chemistry department. That’s what Gary Rice, chair of William and Mary’s own Department of Chemistry, told me recently.

Dennis Manos extolls the many virtues of William and Mary's newly opened Integrated Science Center, Phase 1, during an informal tour.

If I wanted to argue with him I could offer up, say, a metallurgy department, but when it comes to the classic college disciplines, I think he’s correct: Nothing is as inherently hard on a building as chemistry. Think about it. Have you ever heard an anecdote about a student who blew up a history building?

Rice and I had an impromptu chat during a visit to William and Mary’s new Integrated Science Building recently. He and his fellow chemists were the first to move into the first phase of the ISC, moving from the adjoining Rogers Hall. Just as soon as chemistry had moved, workers began gutting Rogers in preparation for its transformation into ISC Phase 2. Chemists are on two floors of ISC 1; biology labs are on the top floor.

I spoke with Rice during my second visit to the new building within a week. ISC Phase 1–the new construction–is set at a right angle with Rogers. During my first visit inside the new building, tagging along on a tour, a group of us gazed out of a third-floor window on the Landrum Road end. We watched construction workers shovel debris into a dumpster from the second floor of Rogers. Dennis Manos, the vice provost for research at William and Mary, gestured toward the far corner of Rogers, indicating the hypotenuse opposite the 90 degree angle of the Rogers-ISC connection.

“There,” he said, drawing the diagonal in the air with his arm. “There’s where we want to put the ISC 3–to complete the triangle. But that’s going to be a few years yet.”

If anyone forgets what it was like in the old Rogers Hall, here's a trip down memory lane. I had a photo from a lab featuring a tapestry of dogs playing pool, but I couldn't find it.

In mid-July, people were working on the building while people were working in the building; painters and other tradesmen doing finishing work amid chemists and biologists setting up their labs and conducting experiments. Data points were being collected within a few feet of where drywall joints were being taped. Most everything was new and gleaming.

“I feel like I’m on a cruise ship sometimes,” Manos remarked as nodded at a particularly nautical looking light fixture. He pointed out the colloquium areas scattered throughout the common area of the ISC 1, niches fitted with tables, chairs and benches.

“This is the way science is done,” he explained. “Over coffee. In hallway conversations.” He said many of the colloquium areas will be equipped with whiteboards for the recording of the first drafts of a generation of great ideas.