he fledgling institution in its new home was such an immediate success that it almost immediately required more space. Initially, adjacent houses given to the Institute by its board and the Drexel family were adapted for laboratories and architecture. By 1901, spurred by a splendid gift of paintings from John Lankenau, brother-in-law of the late Anthony J. Drexel, the Wilson Brothers were asked to add a second building, Randell Hall, to the east of the Main Building. It followed the buff tonality of the original building but with a more robustly Beaux-Arts classical character. Curtis Hall, in the simplified classicism of the 1920s, followed from the office of Edward Simon, a 1900 graduate of the Institute.

Drexel's strongest supporters could scarcely have envisioned the changes that have occurred in its first century in transportation or technology, as railroads and steamships were supplanted by automobiles, airplanes, and spaceships, and "as telephones led to television, and typewriters to modern word processors. In that same century, Philadelphia itself has been transformed from the nation's principal manufacturing center, served by three great railroads, to a service center and regional financial district. Still, despite the vast changes in society and industry, it is perhaps not a surprise that the Wilson Brothers' visionary masterpiece remains central to what has become a major university. The regular grid of its structure has proven amenable to many alterations as some departments and schools have expanded while others have moved to their own buildings.

More remarkably, the most important features of the Main Building-its handsome facade and its great) light-filled, buff-toned court have been preserved; floors were not inserted, nor was the ceiling lowered as so often happened in the efficiency-conscious 1960s when Victorian architecture was most criticized. Indeed, its only losses have occurred not by design but by accident when the leaded glass lay-lights were blown out by an explosion in a nearby building in 1956 and the chandelier was removed during repairs. Unlike so many educational institutions that demolished their earlier buildings or even moved to new campuses, Drexel is fortunate: its landmark original building survives, a continuing delight to its students and the focus of fond memories of its alumni. There can be no doubt that in the pantheon of Philadelphia's great nineteenth century academic buildings, including T. U. Walter's Girard College and Frank Furness's University of Pennsylvania Library, belongs the Wilson Brothers' Drexel University Main Building.