Talk about scientific advancement.

In 2011, aspiring science students and faculty at Lehman College will move from Gillet Hall, a 1930s building that was never really designed for laboratory work, and other disparate campus quarters, to a stunning new “green” structure that will rise in the leafy campus’s northwest corner near the APEX gymnasium.

The new 69,000-square-foot Science Building will bring all of Lehman’s scientific disciplines under one roof. Lehman’s president, Dr. Ricardo Fernandez, said there had been little interaction among students and researchers in different disciplines, but that the new building will “allow us to bring the sciences to one location.”

It helps scientific discovery and collaboration, he said, to have chemists rubbing shoulders with physicists, biologists and even psychiatrists, Fernandez said at a groundbreaking last Wednesday.

The facility will be home to the undergraduates, graduate and doctoral students, and even aspiring science teachers.

The project is the first new laboratory building in what is being called the CUNY Decade of the Sciences.  And the structure will also be a showcase of sustainable engineering. It will collect and filter stormwater for maintenance. A native grass wetland in the main courtyard will serve as a teaching and research tool, while using the same filtered stormwater. And solar hot water panels will convert sunlight to energy.

The building, designed by the firm Perkins and Will, will be completed in two phases, totaling 207,000 square feet and $276 million. The second phase, which will include additional dry and wet labs, classrooms and a lecture hall, is slated for completion in 2015. And a third phase will eventually modernize Gillet Hall and join it to the new building with an elevated walkway.

The entire project is the most significant one undertaken during Fernandez’s 19-year tenure at Lehman. While the bulk of the APEX was completed after he started at Lehman, it was planned by his predecessor, Leonard Lief.

“This one I had to work for,” he said, referring to the Science Building, which he began pushing for in the late 1990s.