Irvine, Calif.
What makes John V. Croul Hall work for its users are its bright, spacious labs -- for ecologists and chemists who work with ice cores and ocean samples, for climate researchers building sophisticated devices for field studies on other continents, for hydrologists and atmospheric physicists who create computer models to show how the sea and sky work together in ways that are only beginning to be understood.

But what makes the building work for everyone else on the sprawling and architecturally fascinating University of California campus here are a dynamic facade, a dramatic entrance atrium, and a copper-clad rooftop drum with an oddly shaped pyramid protruding from it. Croul Hall is first and foremost a research building, with serious ventilation systems and a high-tech accelerating mass spectrometer in the basement. But its designers took care to make it fun to look at, too.

Croul, which opened last fall, is the new home of the university's 20-year-old department of earth-system science, whose 22 faculty members and 24 graduate students study issues like global warming and ozone depletion. The building has 68,830 square feet of space and cost $26-million. It was paid for with donations and by borrowing against the faculty's ability to attract research grants that include payments for overhead costs.

The department's researchers are drawn from different disciplines, a fact that helped define a goal for the building's architects. "We all checked our disciplines at the door," says William S. Reeburgh, a professor of earth-system science who was one of the department's original members. "We asked, What can you do to the building to make us more effective?"

That challenge, he says, excited Croul's design architects, Esherick Homsey Dodge & Davis, which did initial planning for the building. Carrier Johnson, the architect of record, completed the plans. What the building does to make the department effective, it turns out, is fairly simple: Researchers' offices are grouped together so their inhabitants can interact, and an attractive, round conference room helps them share their ideas with others.

The building's location gives it prominence. It faces a plaza on the main pedestrian walkway surrounding the circular park at the center of the campus, which was originally laid out by the Modernist architect William Pereira. Croul counts among its nearby neighbors both Frank Gehry's little Computer Science and Engineering complex and James Stirling's vast Science Library.

Croul's glassy entry, which provides a significant amount of the building's architectural interest, angles between two bold, perpendicular walls of concrete block the color of light ash. A copper porte-cochere hangs over the doorway, which admits visitors to a bright space dominated by a concrete stairway that zigzags elegantly upward through the emptiness, supported by a single concrete column.

Beyond the stairway is the interior's other major showpiece, a copper-sheathed curved wall that rises a full three stories. On the top level, it becomes the outside of the circular conference room -- and then it pops through the roof to appear as the copper drum on top of the building. The pyramid, in turn, surmounts the drum, pierced by a big, north-facing window that brings light into the conference room below.

The interior is otherwise unadorned. Labs fill the lower two floors, and faculty offices ring the third. The rest of the exterior is similarly unassuming, with simple articulations in the masonry surrounding the windows. These articulations are lightly drawn on three sides of the building but much more deeply inscribed on the facade facing the pedestrian ring, below the drum and the pyramid -- right where people are most likely to be looking.