From the banks of the Schuylkill River out to 40th Street, a mix of renovation projects and new construction is reshaping the University’s academic, residential and commercial spaces.
By John Prendergast | Photos by Greg Benson
Sidebar | All According to Plan
Titus Hewryk, University architect, leans over a campus map that covers most of a table in a conference room in the Office of Facilities Services and points to spot after spot where construction is just completed, now under way or slated to commence. The map is marked with pen and pencil scratches and is out of date, but what will be where–eventually–is clear in his mind. In a gruff, lightly accented voice, his glasses perched low on his nose, he reels off a list of a dozen or so projects. When the tape ends, he stops obligingly and strokes his beard. “That is in a nutshell what is happening,” he says–and then remembers a few more.
Hewryk, who has worked at Penn for 25 years, has been around almost long enough to remember the University’s last building binge of similar scale–the period in the 1950s through the early 1970s that began roughly with the closing to traffic of Woodland Avenue, which had cut diagonally through campus, and concluded with the creation of Superblock. Those decades shaped much of Penn’s present-day campus, but the University’s use of urban-renewal legislation to appropriate land in the surrounding neighborhoods poisoned community relations for a long time after, with still-lingering effects and, architecturally speaking, the results were, well, mixed. Legacies of the era include such highly regarded structures as the Richards Medical Research Laboratories (1962), designed by Louis I. Kahn Ar’24 Hon’71, and Eero Saarinen’s Hill House (1960), but it also gave Penn many others that are viewed as undistinguished or are actively disliked –of which the three high-rise dormitories constructed in the aforementioned Superblock may rank first and foremost. (For more on the ups and downs of Penn’s architectural history, see the story on page 38.)
This time around, the University has gone to considerable effort to secure community buy-in for its building plans, especially with commercial projects like Sansom Common and along the 40th Street corridor, where campus and community intersect. Through the University City District, Penn has supported efforts to improve lighting, street-cleaning and other services. And the University has stepped up efforts to encourage faculty and staff to make homes in West Philadelphia through expanded mortgage assistance and other incentives and a planned K-8 public school in West Philadelphia.
The current wave is also as much about re-building as it is about new construction. Among the most significant projects under way is the Perelman Quadrangle, which knits together five existing structures–Houston Hall, Irvine Auditorium, College Hall, Logan Hall and Williams Hall–to create an undergraduate student center organized around a new central plaza. And a $300 million, 10-year Dining and Housing Renewal Program announced last fall includes a $75 million renovation of the Quad dormitories as well as renovation work and major new construction in the former Superblock area, which has been renamed Hamilton Village. As the name implies, this project too is seen as a type of restoration–an effort to recapture some of the small-scale sense of community missing in a comparatively bleak sector of campus. In August, two architectural firms were selected to design the first phase of this project. (The overall program also includes renovations to the Hill House dining area, completed this summer; demolition of Stouffer Triangle and construction of a new dining facility on the site; expansion of the Class of 1920 Commons; and assorted smaller renovation efforts.)
Other new construction, like the Wharton School’s Huntsman Hall, being built on the former Penn Bookstore site at 38th Street, involve reuse of University land, rather than displacing current neighborhood residents. Surface parking lots–like the one at 34th and Chestnut, where the University would like to build a mixed-use complex, or at 40th and Locust, where the Schattner Center, the Dental School’s new building, is going up–are other favored sites for development. The need to make the best use of limited space is one of the reasons cited for an effort begun last spring to craft a new campus development plan (see box on page 28).
Here is a tour of the campus to come, running roughly east to west.
From left: the Biomedical Research Building, completed in May; work proceeds in the Perelman Quadrangle.
From the Schuylkill to 34th Street–A commercial residential venture, recreation and a mix of new academic and research space
East Side, Westside. At the eastern edge of Penn’s campus, the University has leased the former GE Building, a vacant warehouse at 31st and Chestnut Street that it has owned since 1996, to a local developer to be converted into a high-end apartment complex. The $54 million project, which won’t use any University or public money, is scheduled to open in 2001. It calls for 285 apartments, retail and office space, a rooftop fitness center and an indoor parking garage for residents. The main entrance for the complex, to be called Westside Commons, will be at 32nd and Walnut streets. While the building is not designed as University housing, it’s expected to attract students, faculty and staff who might otherwise choose Center City apartments, and it should help brighten the approach to the campus along Walnut Street.
Safe Storage. Plans call for work to start next spring on a new wing of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The 35,000-square-foot facility will provide much-needed, climate-controlled storage space for the museum’s collections–some 90 percent of which are currently stored in the basements of the original wings of the Museum in far-from-ideal conditions–and offices for people working with the collections. The addition will be named for A. Bruce (C’47) and Margaret (Ed’47 Hon’85) Mainwaring, who have contributed $3.5 million toward construction.
The new wing will project out toward South Street. The storage area will be on the east side of the building, which will be windowless to allow control of light, temperature and humidity. The western side, which faces onto an existing courtyard, will be for offices and seminar rooms. The façade on that side will echo the materials and design of the older wings, and the courtyard will also be relandscaped. Architects on the project are Atkin, Olshin, Lawson-Bell and Associates.
New Fields to Conquer. Work was scheduled to be finished this month on a $350,000 project to shift Bower Field, formerly Penn’s baseball field, to general recreational uses in order to centralize the recreation program. However, this summer’s drought has put off sodding until the fall. The baseball team’s new home will be Murphy Field, which is undergoing a $2 million conversion, including construction of bermed seating for 1,000, to be finished in time for the spring 2000 season.
Next to the field, a $63 million chilled water plant to provide air conditioning and process cooling water for campus buildings is under construction. Besides providing an ultimate capacity of 50,000 tons of water and allowing the University to retire three older facilities, the plant boasts an architectural design incorporating a monumental perforated metal screen, which has been featured in Architecture magazine and other publications. The plant is scheduled to start providing chilled water in May 2000.
Engineering Expansion. What is now a parking lot and loading dock between the Towne Building and the Graduate Research Wing of the Moore School Building will become the home of the Center for Computer Information and Cognitive Sciences. Known as IAST II because it is the second phase of the planned five-phase Institute for Advanced Science and Technology (the first involved construction of the Roy and Diana Vagelos Laboratories, which opened in November 1997), the $15 million building will be named for Melvin J. Levine W’46 and his wife Claire, who gave $5 million to the project. Now in preliminary design and tentatively scheduled to open in November 2001, the four-story structure, totaling 39,000 square feet, will provide laboratories for teaching and research in computer and information science; also included will be a café within the graduate wing and surrounding walks and courtyard.
More Medical Research Space. In May, the Biomedical Research Building (BRB II/III) opened. Designed by the architectural firm Perkins and Will, the $149 million, 15-story structure includes 11 floors of laboratories, along with an auditorium, a café, bookstore and seminar rooms on the lower floors. The building’s 384,000 square feet brings together 800 researchers and support staff in disciplines such as cell and development biology, reproductive biology, gene therapy and other related fields that had previously been scattered across the Health System’s other facilities.
According to plans announced last fall, Penn and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia will redevelop 10.7 acres of the 19.2 acre site of the former Philadelphia Civic Center to construct a cancer treatment and research center, as well as parking facilities and commercial space. Penn would get most of the land and bear the cost of demolishing the existing buildings and environmentally remediating the area; CHOP would pay $3 million for a 2.5 acre parcel. The University would also pay $320 million of the estimated $450 million total cost to redevelop the site, with CHOP picking up most of the rest.
34th to 38th Street, North Side–Reclaiming Walnut Street, a Wharton building that looks both ways, restoration at the Law School and a possible new neighbor on Chestnut Street
Downtown University City. The September 1 official opening of the 238-room Inn at Penn marked the completion of Sansom Common, which has become emblematic of Penn’s push to revitalize University City. Besides the guest rooms, which boast an array of high-tech features (including Internet and PennNet access), the hotel includes a restaurant, the Ivy Grille, with an entrance on Walnut Street. Space in the hotel will also be occupied by the Faculty Club, which vacated its former location in Skinner Hall in August.
Constructed on the site of a former surface parking lot, the $120 million project also includes the Penn Bookstore and an assortment of retail operations. Those opened last summer and fall. The bookstore has become a new landmark on campus, and the plaza along 36th Street a popular gathering place for students, staff and visitors. More outdoor seating has been added on the other side of 36th Street, and a trellis constructed to conceal the loading dock for the Franklin Building Annex.
Sansom Common is also a big step toward “reclaiming” Walnut Street, which Penn effectively “turned its back on” in the 1960s. At the time, Hewryk says, officials were intent on creating a traditional campus core from what had been city streets. Projects like Van Pelt-Dietrich Library and the Annenberg School and Center look inward, with entrances that face Locust Walk.
The Annenberg School, though, is currently completing a $15 million renovation. While the main purpose is to carve out space in what was the school’s auditorium to house the Annenberg Public Policy Center, the project will also create a new entrance and courtyard on Walnut Street. The Center itself will overlook Walnut, from windows cut into the building’s previously blank façade.
At 37th Street, some new construction as well as renovations to Gimbel Gymnasium will create the Pottruck Health & Fitness Center, named for David S. Pottruck C’70 WG’72, who designated $10 million of a $12 million gift to fund the project. An architect is to be selected for the project this month, with construction scheduled to begin early next summer and finish by September 2001.
“We want to have Sansom as a destination place–the Penn campus’s downtown, where, instead of jumping in a taxi, and going [to Center City], they would stay here,” says Hewryk. “With the bookstore and plaza and the hotel and now the Pottruck Center, we have this opportunity. There is a fantastic relationship between the recreational center and the hotel and the surrounding academic space.”
Once Wharton’s new building is complete, “we’ll have 4,000 kids over there on a daily basis,” says Hewryk. Also bringing new vitality to the corridor will be the conversion of Skinner Hall–which will be renamed Addams Hall–to studio space for the Graduate School of Fine Arts. Combine that with the presence of the Institute for Contemporary Art at 36th Street, and “We have a very interesting arrangement, almost like a little SoHo over here,” Hewryk says, with a not-entirely joking laugh.
Site-sensitive, State-of-the-art. By 2002, on the block formerly occupied by the one-story structure that housed Penn’s bookstore and an assortment of restaurants and stores, will rise the $120 million, 320,000-square-foot Huntsman Hall, which will become the main educational space for Wharton’s graduate and undergraduate programs. The design, by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, uses materials that include red brick and stone to reflect neighboring campus buildings. In terms of mass and height, the building is designed to fit into its “two-sided” site. The side facing Locust Walk matches the more intimate scale of the traditional campus, while the tower on Walnut Street is in scale with a parking garage on the other side of Walnut at 38th and with the Inn at Penn and Bookstore at Sansom Common.
The facility has 48 classrooms and 57 group-study rooms equipped for multimedia, audio/videoconferencing, video production and editing, the ability to connect between group workstations and Internet access. There are also four teaching labs, two study lounges and–for those occasional non-studying moments–separate undergraduate and MBA cafes. Other spaces include a forum able to accommodate 500 people for special events, a 300-seat auditorium on the ground floor, and, on the top of the builing, a colloquium area able to accommodate 200 people and equipped to host meals. The top floor also includes a sky-lit hall with views of Penn’s campus and Center City. Funding is from donations, including $40 million from Jon M. Huntsman W’59 Hon’96.
Birthday Makeover. An $11 million renovation of the Law School’s Silverman Hall is under way, with completion timed to coincide with the historic building’s centennial in November 2000. (Formerly Lewis Hall, the building was renamed for Henry R. Silverman L’64, who gave $15 million to the school for the renovation and other purposes.) Along with extensive interior work on offices, classrooms and other spaces, the project will restore the building’s Great Hall and Grand Stair, including rehabilitation of the marble terrazzo and mosaic tile floors (covered by linoleum in a 1960s renovation); clean and repair the building façade and fencing and landscape the perimeter; and reopen the entrance on 34th Street, closed for more than a decade.
Another Parking Lot Lost? In June, the University proposed constructing a building combining restaurant and retail space, classrooms and housing for faculty and students making extended visits to campus at 34th and Chestnut, next to the Penn-owned Sheraton Hotel and across the street from the Law School. The University bid $8.2 million to purchase the site, currently a surface parking lot, from the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority. Penn’s bid was the only one, but still must be approved by the city before a purchase can go through. The University’s preliminary proposal envisioned a 250-room residential facility; a parking garage for 786 cars; 28,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space, and 120,000 square feet of classroom and research space–with a reported pricetag of $111 million.
34th to 38th Street, South Side–A tale of two quadrangles
Progress on Perelman Quad. The Perelman Quadrangle, named for Ronald O. Perelman W’64 WG’66, who gave $20 million toward the project, will create a new undergraduate student center by linking Houston Hall, College Hall, Logan Hall, Williams Hall and Irvine Auditorium around a central plaza, to be called Wynn Commons (for Stephen A. Wynn C’63, who is contributing $7.5 million). Architects on the project are Venturi Scott Brown and Associates.
The future Wynn Commons still resembles an archaeological dig as work continues to expand Houston Hall’s basement, but renovations to Irvine Auditorium were completed in August. Besides improving the acoustics of the space and adding a small recital hall and café, the work also included restoration of the building interior–a particularly striking aspect of which is the hall’s distinctive murals. The first event to be scheduled in Irvine was President Rodin’s remarks to parents on September 4; the entire Perelman Quad project is to be finished by next summer.
Cool in the Quad. Air-conditioning in the Quad? The idea brought gasps of disbelief and mock-protest when Larry Moneta, associate vice president for campus services, briefed the Alumni Society’s executive board on the renovation program last spring. Scheduled to run over four summers (1999-2002), the $75 million project will do a lot more than cool the one-time men’s dormitories, more recently the precinct of Penn’s freshman class–and envisioned as a home for students of all classes under the college-house system established last year (see story on page 32). The exterior brick will be cleaned and repointed, and extensive landscaping will restore the area as well as improve drainage. On the inside, the electrical system will be upgraded and new plumbing and bathroom fixtures will be installed, as well as elevators and other adjustments in line with the Americans With Disabilities Act.
The infrastructure renovations are being done in conjunction with a reorganization of the space in the Quad into three college houses, each grouped around its own courtyard. (This was the recommendation of a committee composed of faculty and students living in the four college houses headquartered in the Quad this past year.) The design, by Ewing Cole Cherry Brott, will add a new entrance on Hamilton Walk and reconfigure interior space to accommodate offices, computer-lab and study space–”all the core college house/hub facilities,” says Moneta.
Landscape consultant Andropogon Associates “has looked at all the original landscaping,” he adds. “To the best of our ability, we’re going to restore some of the original character [within the context of] a fully contemporary landscape design. We’re talking about beautiful benchwork and park-like settings and recreation space.”
Beyond 38th Street–The once and future Hamilton Village, seeing and eating, and the Dental School’s new “gateway”
What Makes a Village? Over the next decade, the University will renovate the 30-year-old high-rises and build new low-rise college houses organized around a series of quadrangles in the area now called Hamilton Village. The new houses will initially be used as “swing” space, while each of the high-rises is renovated; when finished, the project is intended to add 1,000 new undergraduate beds to the University’s housing stock.
Those involved in planning the new houses are doing their best to ensure that, this time around, the architecture is part of the area’s attraction for students. Dr. David Brownlee, professor of art history and director of the Office of College Houses and Academic Services, goes so far as to express the hope that the eventual designs for the new buildings will “make the cover of the architecture magazines.” To that end, six firms representing the “diversity and talent of architecture today,” Brownlee says, were selected last spring to participate in an architectural competition to work on the project.
Representatives of the firms were given a tour of the campus that highlighted such architectural treasures as the Quad and Locust Walk, an explanation of the college-house system, background on the history of the area and some general design guidelines. Based on this information, they were asked to submit preliminary designs for the section between Walnut and Locust from 39th to 40th Street to the Hamilton Village committee in mid-July.
As the Gazette was going to press in August, we learned that two architects had been selected for the first phase of the project: Patkau Architects of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, which will design two low-rise structures; and Philadelphia-based Kieran, Timberlake & Harris, which offered a proposal for dividing each high-rise into two college houses.
Brownlee praised Patkau Architects’ design for its “powerful image of the overall ground plan of the project, creating, most strikingly, a kind of urban piazza–an intimate but strong space in front of St. Mary’s Church.” Locust Walk would be broadened at that point, with the college house and courtyard to be constructed on the site occupied by a playing field and a Philadelphia Free Library branch, currently closed indefinitely for repairs. (The needs of the Library will be accommodated in the eventual final design, though exactly how has not been determined.) A highlight of the courtyard space is the “use of pools of water–fountains to create a sense of quiet and sonic isolation,” Brownlee says. The Patkau design also featured an “extraordinarily intelligent room planning component.”
Kieran, Timberlake & Harris came up with what the judges felt was “the most intelligent proposal for working with the high-rises,” Brownlee says, which they will investigate further this year. The rationale for dividing the buildings into two college houses is to make them more intimate and increase opportunities for people to get to know each other. “We’re doing about as well as we can with communities of 800 people, but you can do better with communities of 400–if you can figure out a way to make the buildings work that way” without resorting to an arbitrary decision like splitting by even-odd floors. “Their proposal makes use of the existing elevators but creates two different lobbies,” each connected to a pair of elevators serving only that college house’s floors, Brownlee says. “They have two separately operating entities in the same physical skin.”
All six submitted designs are to be publicly displayed this fall, “to engage in campus-wide discussions of the lessons to be learned from them,” says Brownlee. “I think there are exciting lessons to be learned from all six. Certainly we learned a lot from them.” Meanwhile, the chosen firms will begin working with University officials and campus committees to develop budgets and a schedule for the work.
Adding more spaces for undergraduates to live on-campus in the college-house system opens up the opportunity “to pull some of the undergraduate occupancy out of the University City-West Philadelphia area and replace it with graduate students and [an] owner-occupied family presence that strengthens the community,” Moneta says. “I think this has been a very well choreographed model for linking on-campus planning intentions with off campus.”
Big Screens, Meals and Wheels. Efforts to make the 40th Street corridor University City’s true “Main Street” got a major boost when it was announced last fall that Robert Redford’s Sundance Cinemas had decided to build a movie theater there. Work got started this summer on the eight-screen complex, which will show independent films and will also include a restaurant and coffee bar, a video library, retail space, a lecture room and landscaped outdoor seating area. Across Walnut Street, and also under way this summer, is a fresh food market and 800-car garage. Besides a full-service market, there will also be an indoor and outdoor café, a sushi bar and a section selling fresh-cut flowers. The University parking system will operate the garage above the market. Both projects are scheduled to be completed next summer.
Filling a Gap. Finally, a bit further down the block toward Spruce Street, construction is also under way on the School of Dental Medicine’s new “gateway” building, named for Dr. Robert Schattner D’48, who contributed $4 million to the campaign to build it. The Schattner Center, going up where a parking lot used to be, will link the school’s other facilities–the Evans Building and the Leon Levy Center–to create a unified Dental campus, with a single entrance on 40th Street. The Center’s 55,000 square feet will house facilities for patient-care, as well as patient meeting areas, conference rooms, faculty offices and a gallery to display the art collection donated to the School by Thomas Evans in the 19th century. It should be finished in Spring 2001.
SIDEBAR
All According to Plan
Even as backhoes and bulldozers
were revving their engines for one of the busiest construction seasons
in decades, last spring the University administration proposed creating a
new campus development plan. An article in Almanac, the
University’s journal of record, called the initiative –tentatively
scheduled to be finished by early 2000–the “next chapter” in the
planning process begun with the Agenda for Excellence and cited
as its primary purpose “to assure that the University’s physical
environment fulfills the needs of its academic mission.”
Dr.
Robert Barchi Gr’72 M’73, the provost, who, along with Penn President
Judith Rodin CW’66 and John Fry, executive vice president, signed the Almanac piece, says that the plan will “look at the campus from the point of view of best uses.” What the plan won’t do,
he and others are quick to point out, is assign space to a particular
school or center or make specific decisions on capital projects or the
commitment of resources. “The idea is to create a living plan that we
can revisit every year, and against which we can benchmark our
decisions–a broad plan of how the campus might evolve,” says Barchi.
Two
main objectives are cited in the proposal: The first is to look at how
well the academic and scholarly environment meets the needs of faculty,
students and staff for teaching, research and support services. This
could include issues such as how teaching trends affect the use of
academic space; common approaches to configuring office, research and
classroom space; or the impact of technology on teaching methods and
classroom use. The second area is described as “student, faculty and
administrative life; neighborhood and community life; and campus
amenities.” This involves building on initiatives such as the college
houses and hubs designed to create a more integrated living/learning
environment. Three other areas that will be examined are how to make the
most of Penn’s large number of historic buildings; how issues of
access, circulation, transportation and service affect the physical
environment; and maintenance and operations issues.
Six
faculty-staff-student committees–one for each of the main topics, plus a
steering committee chaired by Barchi–were appointed in April. “The idea
is not to generate a plan from the top, [but] to accumulate as much
wisdom as we can from the University community,” he says. “So the
committees were specifically put together to bring into the same room as
broad a cut of representation as we possibly could.” A series of public
forums will also be held–probably one for each of the five topics–at
which “anyone and everyone can say what they want and get into an open
dialogue about these issues.”
To act as “facilitator” in
developing the plan, the University has brought in Olin Partnership,
Ltd., a landscape architecture and urban design firm headed by Laurie
Olin, practice professor in the Graduate School of Fine Arts. Members of
the firm spent the summer interviewing school and University leaders;
collecting data on existing buildings and their uses; and “helping to
frame the issues and set the questions that the committees will want to
deal with,” says Barchi. The expectation is that committee meetings and
the forums will be held in early fall, with committee work then
continuing to develop a set of recommendations for consideration by the
president and trustees.
“There is a timetable that is fairly
aggressive and optimistically looks forward to completing the process by
the end of the fall,” says Barchi. “We would hope that by the beginning
of the new year we would have at least an interim report. It may
require more time than that to get the final report together.”
Though
he was appointed provost only last year, Barchi has been at Penn since
1968 as a student and faculty member. “The campus has changed incredibly
over that period,” he says. “Watching the campus grow has been a
tremendous experience. It’s kind of like watching your kids grow up. You
don’t really see the day-to-day changes as much as someone who goes
away and comes back 25 years later and says, ‘What happened to my
campus?’”
The current flurry of construction activity is the
result of a confluence of several factors. “One is the relationship
between the University and the community, which reached a nadir sometime
in the past and has been dramatically improved lately, in large part
due to the efforts and clear focus of the president on that issue,”
Barchi says. “And in that regard a number of the construction projects
at the interface between the University and the community are designed
to enhance the relationship both with the students and the community.
That’s one kind of project that has been going on.”
That all
construction decisions, even the most “commercial” projects, are
predicated on the academic mission of the University is a point that
“bears repeating and emphasizing,” Barchi notes. A project such as
Sansom Common, besides providing retail opportunities for students and
space for people visiting campus, “also provides a cash stream to
support academic programs, which is not widely appreciated.” Similarly,
in addition to addressing student demand for more and varied venues for
social interaction, the Sundance movie theater on 40th Street also
offers “very specific educational opportunities in film, and programs
that can be bridged between our fine-arts and theater programs and the
commercial venture itself,” he says.
“In other projects, there’s a
life-cycle for a physical plant: We take a dorm and put students in it
for 30 years–you’re going to have to do something eventually” to
renovate it, Barchi notes. Along with that necessity comes “an
opportunity to rethink the appropriateness of the structure. What may
have been very appropriate 20-30 years ago may not be so today.” This
would apply to something like the Hamilton Village project, which will
combine renovation of the high-rises with new low-rise construction to
better support the college-house system.
Those are important, but
“A major part of this resurgence is really the revitalization and
enthusiasm that came with Judith Rodin and her academic planning–and
what follows from that academic planning,” Barchi says. “If we want to
be one of the most research-intensive universities in the world and be
one of the most attractive to students, then we must have a physical
environment that supports the academic mission–and if we must have that,
there are consequences to the building program.”
The size of the
capital program for construction makes campus planning all the more
critical now, Barchi concludes. “We have to be very measured and very
careful about the decisions that we make–because what we’re building now
is going to put in place for the next 20-30 years a cycle of
construction that our successors will have to live with and carry the
University forward on.”
