Even from a distance one senses a crystalline presence about the Pappajohn Education Center. It glows from within-not unlike the way E.T. glowed when emoting, or, one presumes, the way a nuclear reactor glows in production. Photographic images reinforce the building's luminosity. Its all-glass wrapper, milk-ish and translucent, facilitates it. Had the building been built in Berlin, ca. 1920, its plan would have been either biomorphic or fractured, its gestures greatly exaggerated, and its style unmistakably expressionistic. In 21st century Des Moines, the plan is standard Modernism: L-shaped and undoubtedly economical.