Venturi's architectural legacy is most striking at the southern end of the campus, where several of his buildings are grouped. McCosh Walk has served as Princeton's main east-west axis for more than 100 years, but now is rapidly being supplemented by a second axis running from Butler College and Wu Hall east between the Lewis Thomas and Schultz Laboratories to the Fine-Jadwin math and physics complex. The inevitable expansion of the campus defined by this new axis, flanked with Venturi buildings, will only increase its importance.

These structures also reflect a rare institutional misjudgment on the part of the University -- and Princeton's determination to overcome it. During 1970s, the University did not see the coming trend in molecular biology, and allowed some of its top faculty members in this field to depart. A few years later, with molecular biology in the ascendance, President Bowen led a push to establish a first-rate molecular biology department at Princeton. (Professor Arnold Levine, brought in to chair the new department, was one of the professors who had left Princeton in the 1970s.)

That a new building, Lewis Thomas Laboratory, would be erected for the department was a given, with Venturi granted the commission for the exterior. The firm of Payette and Associates, specialists in laboratory design, worked with the scientists on the interior spaces. For Venturi, therefore, the challenge was mostly one of keeping costs down, and the resulting shoebox-shaped building is what one observer calls "basically a decorated shed." Diamond patterns in the brick account for almost all of the decoration.