If you call Necco to ask for a tour of the old factory, they’ll tell you it’s empty these days.

“They’re still scraping the sugar off the walls,” a receptionist says.

But Novartis has already started the new brand of science that will fill the Necco building. Steele says that after the first few months, Novartis’s new research methods have already yielded some early discoveries.

“For us the proof that this works will come when we are delivering really good drugs,” Steele says. “When that happens, it’s going to change the whole industry. It’s going to change the way medicine’s done.”

Steele’s goals for the Necco facility include new knowledge about the nature of disease, and long-term cures for such illnesses as diabetes and cancer.

And the face of architecture born in 1926 lives on. Even as it confirms the end of an era for Cambridge, the transformation of the building announces a whole new definition of modernity.

That’s more Utilitas than even Alfred J. Barr could have imagined.