Seventy-five years later, the Temple University art school is ditching the leafy campus for an edgier, urban setting.

A sleek new $75 million building, opening in January, will anchor a growing arts hub on Temple's North Philadelphia campus and bring Tyler students closer to the city's bustling arts scene.

The glass-and-brick four-story building designed by house architect Carlos Jimenez, who specializes in art education spaces, will have 40 percent more space than the cramped and jerry-rigged mansion that has been the school's home since Stella Elkins Tyler donated her estate to Temple in the early 1930s.

The move cements Philadelphia's reputation as a vibrant arts community, with seven art schools in the city, more per capita than anywhere else in the country, said Happy Fernandez, president of rival Moore College of Art and Design.

"The wonderful thing about having it close by is that it means there are more opportunities for all of the cultural community in Philadelphia to connect and work with Tyler," she said.

It has been 20 years since Temple administrators decided that it would be cheaper to start from scratch than to renovate the aging Tyler building to meet safety and disability-access laws. Initially, resistance was as solid and immovable as a marble statue.

Faculty, alumni and students "didn't like it one bit," recalled chancellor David Adamany, who oversaw the planning when he was Temple president from 2000 to 2006. "People were attached."

Though the school was old and creaky, it was beloved by alumni.

"They had this romantic notion they wanted Tyler to remain in the spot where they had gone to school," said Patti Dougherty, president of the 7,000-member Tyler alumni association. "If they hadn't been back in 20 years, they weren't seeing how it was today."

What would greet them is a school so crowded that classes are held in garages, sculptures are exhibited on the grass, and the cafeteria is a bad joke. A few years ago, the floor fell out from under a sculpture studio in Elkins Hall.

Opposition has eased over the years, and administrators are quick to point out that even die-hard supporters of the Elkins Park campus are won over after one look at the new state-of-the-art building.

The new Tyler is a modern masterpiece compared with the refined quirkiness of the old school. It will boast larger exhibition halls, bigger studios, better equipment, and more modern facilities for creating large installation pieces, something that was virtually impossible in the former space.

University officials say it also will have the largest green space on campus and will bring together the School of Music - which is next door and will share a large art-filled atrium - and the School of Communications and Theater, which is across the street

"This feels like a contemporary art school," said assistant dean Gregory Murphy. "Tyler is about creativity and pushing contemporary boundaries, and to have anything other than a contemporary building is odd."

The facility is almost all publicly funded, with $61.5 million coming from the state and $8 million of Temple's own money. The school still needs $5.2 million and is selling naming rights for everything from a studio to the entire building.

"I wish I was the law, medical or business school dean," said interim dean Therese Dolan. "Their alumni have deep pockets. Ours are still waitressing."

Peggy Amsterdam, president of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, recently took a tour and was impressed, even though she has fond memories of taking art classes at Tyler as a teenager.

"It was idyllic. There were beautiful plantings. It was one of those little gems that you have when you're growing up that you don't appreciate," she said. "It smelled of linseed oil, which is from the oil paint. It's a smell that you never forget."

But the new school reflects the changing nature of art.