Project Details
- Project Name
- Perry World House
- Location
- PA
- Architect
- 1100 Architect
- Client/Owner
- University of Pennsylvania
- Project Types
- Institutional
- Project Scope
- Addition/Expansion
- Size
- 174,000 sq. feet
- Shared by
- Hanley Wood
- Project Status
- Built
- Cost
- $18,500,000
Sometimes history offers pleasant surprises. Like the fact that the newest building on the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia—Perry World House, a 17,400-square-foot, $18.5-million interdisciplinary institute for global policy designed by David Piscuskas of New York-based 1100 Architect—is also the oldest. That’s because a charming but unassuming 1851 cottage—originally all of 900 square feet, based on pattern-book-like drawings by prodigious local 19th-century architect Samuel Sloan, and formerly an off-campus fraternity—has been adaptively incorporated into a new structure. While much of Penn’s current West Philadelphia streetscape aspires to look like it was built by Georgians or Carolingians, and the college dates itself to the 1740s, the next-oldest building on this, its third campus, dates only to 1873.
“Their mission is an exchange between what might be possible and what comes before us,” says Piscuskas of the research institute—which focuses on national and international intersections between politics, policy, and diplomacy—so a building that visibly contends between old and new is apt. “Because the existing cottage is embedded,” he says, “there’s an idea that we have to live together and get along.” Piscuskas has built a relationship between the orginal cottage and the new construction that is considerably—and willfully—more complex than the conventional façade-ectomy, or the glazed box, which Piscuskas calls “the glass hyphen,” that are the usual ways of architecturally bridging old and new. “One of the first things we tried was to make the new building a generic box,” Piscuskas says. But suppressing the contemporary elements focused attention on Sloane’s cottage, which while picturesque didn’t fully express what Piscuskas describes as the, “highly progressive, highly forward-looking, highly-inclusive,” sensibility of Perry World House.
Instead, in the final design, that notionally generic box inflects and deflects, from its midline to its top, in ways that recall the faceted geometry of the mansard roof and bay window of the original cottage—which now anchors the project’s southwest corner. The monolithic new structure—which is clad in tightly jointed two-inch-thick pale granite panels hung off a broad-spanning steel frame—tightly organizes two stories of classrooms and meeting space, along with 14 faculty offices, a 50-person conference room, and common areas, into a west-facing U-shaped volume centered around a double-height glass-enclosed atrium. Called the World Forum, that atrium is designed for a 150-seat capacity as a multi-use, daylight-filled event space—quite different from the usual flourescent-lit hall. “We’ve had a version of this conversation 500 times before,” Piscuskas recalls a visiting scholar remarking, “but never in a room with natural light.” The cottage’s former attic accommodates a meeting room whose inward-sloping walls encourage literal and figurative leaning in, while its bay window downstairs has been lined with seating and become a kind of conversation pit—reflecting a strategy of cultivating serendipitous and incidental encounters, not only between architectural elements, but between building users themselves.
The geometrical detail that seems most willful is, Piscuskas says, also the most “serendipitous and necessary”: an inverted cutaway chamfer meeting the ground at the new building’s northwest corner, mirroring the angles of the deflected wall above. That corner, it emerged during design development, landed precisely on a manhole accessing a major service node for the western portion of Penn’s campus. “So we just took out a knife,” Piscuskas says. The building’s encounters are not only between old and new, but between the seemingly practical and the willful. While its stony geometry and materiality suggest monumental weight, that reading is complicated by the knife-like steel surrounds to the fenestration that cuts through the building’s surface, and the surprising transparency of the west and east facades. The geometry, “speaks to solidity and permanence,” says Piscuskas, “but sometimes it’s cut through as a shell, to generate ambiguity about solid and void, inside and outside.” The pale granite cladding of the exterior appears to fold inward, in a detail potentially both incidental and polemical, to dress part of the central atrium inside.
Perry World House sits at the entrance to a pedestrian bridge that carries the main campus pathway, Locust Walk, directly across a major thoroughfare to Penn’s celebrated Wharton School of Business, whose most well-known undergraduate alumnus is now the President of the United States. Serpentine wood benches and plantings by landscape designer Bryan Hanes create an open-air forum and lead from the new building to the bridge. By transcending the cheap thrill of mere demolition, by thoughtfully choreographing moments of encounter and exchange, and by locating new conceptual spaces between restoration and innovation, adaption and invention—this new-and-old building embodies the international and interdisciplinary practices of the scholars it shelters. And in this way it offers lessons to all passerby—perhaps even, on some return visit, to that prominent Wharton alumnus. “The spaces are shared,” Piscuskas says. “The boundaries are permeable. That’s something that this building is zealous about.”