Driving through Texas on a recent fall day and in need of gasoline, I pulled off Interstate 35 in Waco. I took advantage of this impromptu stop to visit one of the nation’s best-known Baptist institutions, Baylor University. Baylor’s steeples and neo-Colonial architecture read strongly even from the highway. Still, I wasn’t quite prepared for what I saw a bit farther on.

As I rounded a corner, I saw across a lush green field an enormous red-brick building. Dominating the site were three gable-ended structures, surmounted by cupolas, that were arranged in an arc and joined by two Corinthian colonnades.

The repetition of these church-like forms was impressive, and immediately my mind turned to the Green in New Haven, Conn., just outside Yale University. The New Haven Green’s three chapels, in the center of the town’s original nine-square Puritan plan, form an iconic image of American Protestantism. How interesting, I thought, for Baylor to make such a quotation in a building that I presumed served a religious function.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that this was not a new university megachurch (at least in the conventional sense), but the Baylor Sciences Building. This immense, 508,000-square-foot structure houses the most modern of Baylor’s research programs, laboratories, and teaching spaces. Here the biology, chemistry, geology, and physics departments come together under one roof.

It turns out that I shouldn’t have been surprised. For Baylor, making a science building look religious is intentional. Completed in 2004, the building is one result of the ambitious Baylor 2012 plan, whose goal is to help the university “enter the top tier of American universities while reaffirming and deepening its distinctive Christian mission.”

Becoming a nationally prominent research university while maintaining a serious Christian identity has been a difficult task. As The New York Times put it in 2004, “Baylor is trying to buck the conventional wisdom, which states that when a religious college tries to raise its academic standing, its religious mission inevitably takes a backseat to other concerns.” The Baylor 2012 vision statement calls out Harvard, Yale, and Princeton Universities and the University of Chicago as prime examples of institutions that abandoned faith for intellectual prestige.

Baylor sees the idea that an institution must choose between faith and intellectual prestige as a “figment of the modern imagination.” The Baylor 2012 plan says the university believes “that the highest intellectual excellence is fully compatible with orthodox Christian devotion.” Above the new building’s Corinthian columns is an inscription: “By Him all things are made; in Him all things are held together.” Taken from the Book of Colossians, this inscription asserts firmly that Baylor is an institution where the truths of modern science and of religion go hand in hand.

But remaining committed to this dual approach has not been without its challenges. In 2004, Baylor’s faculty senate approved a vote of no confidence for Robert Sloan, Jr., the university’s president since 1995, over academic-freedom issues. Tension between Mr. Sloan and Baylor’s science departments had also arisen over the appointment of a scholar committed to intelligent design. President Sloan’s initiatives — including the Baylor 2012 plan, which was created under his administration — appeared to challenge free academic inquiry in the name of preserving a Baptist identity. These controversies proved too much for the university, and in 2005 Baylor appointed an interim president.

This makes the architecture of the Baylor Sciences Building all the more interesting. Does it, I wonder, reflect the beliefs of the faculty members working inside it? Of the university’s president? Of the institution’s donors? Who sways the identity and mission of a university, particularly when it comes to religion? —Margaret Grubiak

Margaret Grubiak, this month’s Buildings & Grounds guest blogger, is an assistant professor of architectural history in the humanities department at Villanova University. You can read her previous posts here and here.