University City Science Center announces new development: a 27-story apartment building at 3601 Market Street

A rendering of new residential building at 3601 Market Street on the Science Center campus.

Come 2015, the University City Science Center won’t just be a place to work — it’ll also be  a place to live.

The Science Center announced a new high-end residential development on its campus at 3601 Market Street [Updated, see below]. Construction will begin on the 27-story, 400,000 sq.ft. building in the fall of 2013, according to to the release. It will be the first residential building in the Science Center’s 50-year history.

It’s an effort to extend the notion of the Science Center’s community, which president Stephen Tang said he hopes can become a place to “live, work and play.” The organization’s sense of community has already received nods — most recently, an Ithaca, N.Y.-based company that relocated to Philly cited the Science Center as one of its main reasons for moving here.

The project is a joint effort between the Science Center, Baltimore-based Wexford Equities and Nashville, Tenn.-based Southern Land Company.

In other Science Center news, the organization’s QED proof of concept program [Updated, see below] for life sciences and digital health recently awarded $600,000 to research projects at Rutgers University, the University of Delaware and Penn State College of Medicine. For more information on the projects, go here [pdf].

Updated 1/4/12 1:55 p.m.: The new residential development will be at 3601 Market Street, not 3701 Market Street. Also updated to reflect that the QED program is better described as a “proof of concept” program than a “grant-matching” program and that the Science Center gave out $600,000 in grants rather than $100,000.