—

OK, OK, maybe you just got a crappy grade in the Intro to Urban Planning final this semester. Quit procrastinating by instigating Philly phlame wars and get back to the books. And lighten up, you're lucky to be there. Remember you could always transfer to Bronx Community College if the need for a better campus vibe becomes too intense. Plus you'd save alot.

The main knock against Penn in my opinion is that there is no Wendy's nearby, in addition to the general lack of rooftop shopping.

WORD.

The only thing better would be a ROOFTOP WENDY'S. [I think I just peed my pants. :uhh:]

That Notre Dame and Princeton didn't make the list calls it into question (full disclosure: I graduated from the former). As for Penn, I think it's a fine urban campus (full disclosure: I graduated from the Law School). It's not entitlement minded to observe, however, that it's often an incoherent miss-mash, mostly saved by it's older buildings and undermined by the awful mid-late 20th Century stuff. That said, I agree with the feckin' rant about how feckin' ugly Drexel was (I think it's getting much better). Just walking through there on my way to Penn from 30th Street made me appreciate the latter more. Speaking of feckin' ugly, just thinking about the 30th Street area in the 90s makes me want to heave.

(1) I went to Temple.
(2) I did it on loans. IOW shut up about finance.

The way you're missing the point is utterly comical here. The 1960s were an era of immense (public) investment in college campuses. Schools like Cleveland State in Ohio were built literally out of whole cloth in the 1960s.

Or: Every school has ugly 1960s buildings. It's a part of their fabric. Cases in point --

Yale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_U...r_20,_2008.jpg

Harvard:
http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/images/co...7/8/v2/786.jpg

Columbia:
http://www.emporis.com/images/show/6...ast-corner.jpg

U. of Chicago:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...of_Chicago.JPG

Duke University:
http://66.media.tumblr.com/42b58da4a...lyyo1_1280.jpg

So. Stop. Kvetching.

Penn never looked it's best from the city streets. Most of it's best architecture was built in a time in which the campus was actively designed to face itself and turn its back on city streets that everyday Philadelphians use. Penn's presence on Walnut Street is certainly a failing of the campus, one they've tried to remedy in more recent decades to mixed results.

It's not that your criticism is totally off base, it's just not exactly tethered to reality. To totally ignore the heart of Penn's campus, locust walk and the numerous architectural gems that line it, is a major failing of your argument.
To hold Bronx CC's bland library as a great work of architecture and then claim how ugly UPenn is when it has countless buildings that are far more impressive, serves to highlight a clear bias that you hold. Why you hold that bias I don't know. But despite its failings there are parts of Upenn's campus that are undeniably beautiful and by flatly dismissing the entire campus you lose credibility.

You want to advocate for better architecture at Upenn, most would agree that's a worthwhile cause. But if you're to be successful you're going to need to be more realistic. Being so blindly negative only serves to signal yourself as an unreasonable person to others and from there it's difficult to make any progress.

Mods,

Please rename this "The Beautiful Campus Thread"

Or is it the Ugly Campus Thread? Time for a Boxbot thread on Threads about Campus Beauty or Lack Thereof.

Rutgers Camden is another example of a school that essentially came into being in the 60s. It also faces in on itself like parts of Penn and much of Temple. Even though they have taken measures to add more uses on Cooper Street, the nexus of the campus is what used to be the intersection of 4th and Penn Street. Everyday I leave the law school on the western end of campus and walk through the middle of campus to get home not because its shorter but because it's a nice walk.

Penn's Ice Rink will be demolished and redeveloped with mid-rises/high-rises at some point according to the master plan.

The Walnut Street Parking Garage will also be demolished and replaced with a new construction mid-rise at some point.

Rittenhouse Labs I actually like. I also like Wharton's Huntsman Hall and the Highrise Dorms.

And I know plenty of people who have said that Penn's campus is better/nicer than at least half of the supposedly superior institutions that you mentioned.

I attended Columbia and have visited Harvard and MIT and would say that I much prefer Penn's campus to all three. I think a lot of people have dreamy notions about what college campuses are supposed to look like (lots of bilateral symmetry and the prerequisite Collegiate Gothic or neo fill-in-the-blank style architecture) This stuff looks really nice in brochures and can be seductive when you're passing through on a tour and imagining yourself as a bright young scholar on your way to class in dark-wood paneled classrooms. The reality (for me at least) is that when you live with it on a daily basis, it becomes just plain boring and monotonous.

This point was driven home to me recently by a visit to UNC Charlotte's campus. I think that many on this forum would not be too impressed by it. It does, however, have most of the ingredients that you can find at some of the more prestigious colleges that you mentioned. Bilateral symmetry out the wazoo? Check. A lot of brick and stone? Check. Courtyards everywhere? Check. What it doesn't have is the highly intricate ornamentation and patina of age. Yes, it's trying really hard to be like the older campuses, and in the process, it's revealing that this "collegiate" look is kinda shallow. It's nice because it's old and has a lot of ornamentation. It's a one trick pony.

Penn is different. It's not constrained by the same ideas/ideals. It feels a lot more like it's part of the city--it interacts with the grid. Does it have some nice, pretty buildings? Sure, but it doesn't beat you over the head with them. That Penn still feels like a campus without this pre-planned hullabaloo, is a testament to its character and quality, in my opinion.

In short, you're wrong.

Brutalism isn't everyone's cup of tea understandably but it's not to be written off. I attended Arcadia which is a "cute" campus, very small but nice. Our most awarded building was a hulking brutalist mass but continues to receive rave reviews decades later... And we have a damn Castle on campus

Penn certainly has many unique locales on campus with a distinct "sense of place." Locust Walk, the Quad, Franklin Field and The Palestra, Highrise field, Biege Block and fraternity houses, Penn Park, HUP and CHOP complex, etc. are all very different spaces, and the campus in its entirely doesn't really have a unifying theme. I think this makes it more urban and authentic actually. It amazes me how well Penn is integrated into the city fabric. And I'll admit that some buildings certainly leave something to be desired, I think overall the architecture of Penn is actually very interesting and generally well-designed. Even the Brutalism on campus isn't so bad, like Van Pelt library, which I actually like a lot. The modern "high rises in fields" fad ala "The Highrises" at Penn I find pretty interesting actually. A college campus is really the only place where this kind of scheme works well. Penn has one of the best urban campuses in the country, no question, everyone I've ever spoken to loves it.

—

You need to be a bit more nuanced: a university campus and a medical denter campus are two entirely things . . . . obviously. I agree the HUP campus is dismal, and it probably needn't have been had the planners decades ago had more foresight. But that barely distinguishes it from just about every other medical campus out there. They are all pretty awful. Hospitals are pretty awful in general, as architecture. Everywhere in the US, not just at Penn or in Philadelphia.

Happy to be proven wrong, if you can show us all the beautiful medical campuses elsewhere in America. Do they really exist?

:yeahthat:

Glad you posted this. I was actually thinking of posting something similar, with photos of some of Penn Medicine's peers at the top of national rankings of major academic medical centers, e.g., Mass General in Boston, Columbia Presbyterian in NYC, Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Duke in Durham, Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, Texas Medical Center in Houston, UC San Francisco, UCLA, etc. Do a Google image search of these and you'll quickly get the idea. These places all developed in a hodgepodge, organic fashion over time to support the amazing things that go on INSIDE the buildings, with relatively little regard to how cohesive or lovely the campuses and their buildings look architecturally.

And you also make another good point: although ON the Penn campus, the Penn Medicine clinical complex does not DEFINE the Penn campus (just as the other referenced academic medical centers do not define the campuses of their parent institutions).

Agreed. The University campus itself isn't too bad and there have not been egregious repeats of the sixties/seventies mistakes. In fact, although a bit avant-garde for my tastes, some more recent campus buildings have been quite interesting designs. Even if medical centers have tended to be junk, this is really an effort to stand out in a bad way. For beautiful medical campuses, Pennsylvania Hospital comes to mind, but that's hardly a recent example.

Johns Hopkins is pretty nice.

What do you like about Huntsman Hall?

Some nice buildings, but still a bit of a disorganized hodgepodge:

http://images.ibsys.com/2012/0326/30764040.jpg

Also, this includes the medical school buildings. Penn's medical school also has some nice--and historic--buildings.

Jeeze you're a miserable person. Why go to Penn if you hate it so much? I wouldn't have wasted 200 grand to go to school anywhere, much less a place I disliked so much.

5/17/16

Can no longer see Penn Tower from here.

https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net...33&oe=57E15A82

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7586/...fabe062a_c.jpg054 by tehshadowbat, on Flickr

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7771/...4a03b069_c.jpg053 by tehshadowbat, on Flickr

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7103/...172656ce_c.jpg049 by tehshadowbat, on Flickr

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7170/...eff6b05d_c.jpg047 by tehshadowbat, on Flickr

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7013/...6017a221_c.jpg046 by tehshadowbat, on Flickr
https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7424/...842b905d_c.jpg044 by tehshadowbat, on Flickr

With demolition finishing up, any idea when groundbreaking will be for phase 1 of construction?

They should be moving right into excavation, which should take some time. They are going down quite a few floors and they need to be careful because of the museum.

What ever happened to Penn's desire to move the street that runs between the old Penn Tower site and the building that is slowly eating HUP, the one with a half dozen names?

Chop and the city shot it down and it's Convention Ave. The last thing I heard is Convention Ave. will be shut down as there were talks of raising the grade level. A couple months ago you could see outline tape on the side of Perelman where they were suggesting street level be.

WE MIGHT BE IN LUCK! Turns out, after a simulated walk-through, the entire floor plate layout and design was scrapped and completely reconfigured! This was presented today.. The picture shows the old floor plate which matches both the old exterior design we all liked and the new exterior design we all loathed. The new floor plate layout would require a new third exterior render we haven't seen yet!

Now I don't know how to use this old technology, let me see if I can post a picture.

Well figure it out!
:D

Panel OKs plans for new Penn hospital building

http://www.philly.com/philly/busines..._building.html

343 feet isn't bad. Honestly, this looks to be an extension of the Penn Museum...

From the article:

So apparently, we haven't yet seen the final design.

I believe she may be referring to additional needs surrounding the project, such as raising Convention Ave and construction of a tunnel or bridge to the train station.

Perhaps, given that the article is about the Planning Commission's having "voted last week to permit changes to the University of Pennsylvania master plan needed for construction of the building," which sounds more like the types of things to which you're referring (and the kinds of things that are under the purview of the Planning Commission). But the article is kind of ambiguous about the "additional details about the plans" to which she was referring, and I read her statement to mean details about the building design itself. Also note that the caption for the rendering in the article refers to it as a "draft" rendering, further indicating that it's not the final design (and in fact, I've rarely seen the word "draft" used in media coverage of a building design or rendering). Not to mention that the Penn trustees have not yet given their formal approval of the design (among the "university officials" whose approval she cites as still being required). So unless you have inside information to the contrary (which you might ;)), I think we've yet to see the final design and rendering.

The article says 500 rooms. Internally the number 700 is more often discussed. Or 700 more "beds." This could mean only 500 more rooms, but private rooms are the only thing Penn and patients care about anymore these days.

Was this previously listed tentatively as 305 feet?

343 feet is a pretty nice. And that's about it. To those who think Lord Foster can do no wrong, I present Exhibit A. I'm surprised that someone as talented as him would put his name on this. Reminds me of when the Philadelphia Orchestra announced Rafael Viñoly as the architect and then the building ended up being a major flop.

I don't think you can call the Kimmel Center a major flop. It has its issues but overall the building is pretty successful.

I have to agree. I'll reserve judgment on the new hospital until we have a final rendering, but between the Kimmel and the glass cube at Penn, I don't think much of Vinoly these days.

I think it's a bit premature to judge this design, we only have very preliminary renderings.

My first thought when I saw this design was Turin University, which wouldn't be a bad thing. The exterior treatment and interior spaces of that campus are amazing. Time will tell...

http://assets.inhabitat.com/wp-conte...of-Turin-5.jpg

I do find it funny though, I've been coming to this site for almost 15 years when Swinefeld and Volgus were the big Philly posters here, and if you told us then that we would have 2 Norman Foster buildings being built here (one super-tall), everyone would have lost their minds.

I remember when the "St. James" building going up was big news... Oh, have the times changed. ;)

Really? Four years after it opened, the Kimmel Center took Vinoly to court over his shoddy work. A few years after that, Verizon Hall's acoustics had to be fixed (which I acknowledge is not an architectural issue). And in 2011, barely 10 years after its original construction, the building had to be re-designed - at a cost of $15 million - to correct Vinoly's failures. You call that pretty successful? After all that, the Kimmel Center is decent enough, but it's not something I would associate with a superstar architect. Which brings us back to this 'meh' hospital design. I really hope they ditch the ugly beige brick.

they will put their name on anything if they are getting the commission. I doubt all these starchitects' buildings are really great. After a while your rep becomes bigger and better than your actual work. Or you produce a few high profile, highly acclaimed buildings and then you get free passes on everything else.

We could probably split hairs over what are construction failures and what are design failures. The "whole building" was not redesigned, otherwise there would be an entirely different building there, and the cost would be way more than $15 million.
As I said, it has its issues, can't deny that. But in the end it's a good building.
Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings were notorious for roof leaks, and other such failures. Doesn't mean they weren't successful or good buildings. They were sometimes construction problems, sometimes design problems, but they were fixed and are still on the whole regarded as beautiful buildings.

I was just in Cleveland a couple of weeks ago (insert photo thread plug here), and Vinoly was responsible for the modern expansion of their art museum. From the outside, the addition is a disaster from about 90% of angles. Worse than the Kimmel Center, but better than Penn Medicine. However, I found that inside, the addition meshed rather well with the existing structure, and created a pleasant and logically planned out overall museum experience. The main atrium also contained many of the interior design elements that are found in the Kimmel Center. It seems that what Vinoly is good at is creating public spaces, but only for the public that is inside. I wouldn't say his works are generally bad, just incomplete from an exterior standpoint.

I'm not sure how Kimmel works on the interior either. The rooftop garden never worked well and the narrow space between the two internal venues never has worked as a public space. Flow is abysmal. It's not easy to get where you're going around the crowds.

In most cases, (but not the glass cube!) the architect has a program that needs to be fulfilled, building so big, cost so much money, on a certain site, to hold "X" and maybe "Y" and sometimes they are also told details like 'build it out of brick/glass/stone/wood etc. and they have zoning and building code issues to keep in mind. But the part of their job that most people can see and judge them on is how the building looks.
So you can have a very successful building, even an outstanding one in terms of how the building 'works' but it can look like cat crap. Likewise the other way around, a building can look incredible but be a complete failure. Imagine a museum who's galleries are too small to hold the painting that are suppose to be hung in them.
This is what can make the job of an architect, not that its ever just one person, challenging. I think its also why there are so few really good buildings. Its so much easier to build "trash for cash" then it is to start to finish work and sweat the whole process.
Also, generally for an architect to do a truly successful building they need to have an informed client, someone who pushes the architect, but knows when to stop pushing.
(I am not a architect; I sometimes do work for them and its great to work with an good architect, but its often like working with mud if the architect has stopped caring)

The footprint of this project is oddly shaped and they need to use most of it to maximize its size. Penn tower did not use the whole footprint as the Hospital will. The design with the split level seems to be playing towards that. With the skinnier shorter tower in the front and the larger tower portion in the back.

Foster's design may be subdued on the outside but I have seen renderings of the rooms inside and what they are trying to accomplish. Many of the rooms will have awesome views of the city and be quite accommodating to the patient and visitors.

True. But at the Kimmel Center it's not like they were fixing things that were in ill repair like a leaky roof, they fundamentally changed how much of the building interacted with the city around it. They had to do this because the original design was a total failure in this regard. I wouldn't call the entire Kimmel Center a failure, it serves its purpose and some aspects of it are quite nice. But based on how much the Kimmel Center cost and the hiring of Vinoly, people were expecting an iconic building. The kimmel Center certainly falls severely short of that goal in the very least.

As far as the Penn Patient Pavilion, I think I grant a lot more leeway for a hospital in terms of design. You expect the symphony to be in a building making an architectural statement. A hospital is just so much more utilitarian. I like the new rendering better than the two that preceded it... certainly far more than the last design, but this is still really underwhelming, even for a hospital. Hopefully the final render will be even better.

Personally I would have liked to see the true two tower approach come to life more, but it seems they shot that down pretty quick. It would have been taller than the current design to make up the difference in sq. feet.

Here is the floor plan layout for the building you sent me:

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net...96&oe=57C69152

^^ Suggests a total redesign of the building.