Housing classrooms and research facilities, Biology Building East, popularly known as Biology East, was the first part of a two-phase construction and renovation effort to upgrade the complex of biology buildings fronting Jefferson and Dubuque Streets and Iowa Avenue. It emphasizes state-of-the-art technology for both teaching and research. Biology East accommodates electron microscopy and other sophisticated technologies together with the traditional greenhouses occupying the roof.

This fourth component of the biology complex is connected to the Biology Building by a pedestrian bridge over Dubuque Street. If Phillips Hall and the Biology Building’s Dubuque Street wing architecturally represented the leap across Clinton Street, the Postmodernism of Biology Building East announces its distance from those buildings as well. Having moved farther from the Old Capitol in both space and time, there is a departure from both Classicism and Modernism, manifested in new materials and the introduction of a more varied palette of materials and colors.

Biology East is composed of exposed concrete, brown brick, white metal cladding, red stone, and a variety of glass— including green-tinted glass and glass block—that express both the function of each part of the building and the heterogeneity of its urban context. Glass curtain walls front Iowa Avenue and are echoed by the exposed rooftop greenhouse. The building’s entrance responds to the corner of Iowa Avenue and Dubuque Street with a Postmodern complexity of intersecting planes emerging from the simply framed south façade. The recess at the corner shades the entrance, leaving the white-paneled second and third stories almost floating above.