Buildings & Renovations: A Green Urban Campus

The ultimate urban campus. A vibrant campus core, with sophisticated new buildings for research, teaching, and student life. Penn Park, with generous open space and dedicated playing fields, linked together and beautifully landscaped with inviting new walkways, ramps, and promenades that seamlessly connect the campus and the city.

Sustainability at Penn. It's what connects Penn's campus core with Penn Park -- and with the city, region, and world beyond. Penn's new eco-minded buildings and renovations share Penn's commitment to sustainability (Penn's Green Campus Partnership). Penn began the 2009-10 academic year with a Climate Action Plan to identify opportunities for action -- like recycling, conserving energy -- and to build a culture of sustainability at Penn. In 2007, Amy Gutmann signed the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, adding Penn's leadership to the global sustainability effort.

Penn's campus core. Our buildings are the epicenter of living and learning at Penn. Within their walls we conduct pathbreaking new research, forge lifelong friendships, enter undiscovered intellectual worlds. As diverse in style as they are in age, they give our campus its unmistakable character and identity.

Penn Park. With the expansion toward Center City through Penn Connects, Penn's long-term campus development plan, our campus has grown in size and will grow in beauty as well. For Penn, and for the urban university in America, this is new territory -- and our most visible opportunity to make history.

Planned: the Neural and Behavioral Sciences building, a hub for undergraduate education for life sciences at Penn.

Described as “the Huntsman Hall for life science students” -- 25 percent of Penn's undergraduates major in psychology, biology, and biological basis of behavior -- the NBS building will house research laboratories, teaching facilities, and spaces designed for interactions to foster the kind of cross-disciplinary work that increasingly characterizes work in these fields.

While Psychology Department buildings are currently scattered throughout campus, the NBS building will bring them together into one space and next to the other life sciences -- the Perelman School of Medicine, the School of Veterinary Medicine, the Penn Dental School, and the School of Nursing -- sparking new research ideas and bringing current faculty together in the collaborative space while attracting new faculty to Penn.

The building's location will also help link the academic environment and the surrounding community, while its green design and materials allows it to be on target for silver LEED certification.

Golkin Hall
With the completion of Penn Law’s Golkin Hall in January 2012 the verdict is in: a more intimate and harmoniously connected campus, reinvigorated for a growing law school community. Golkin Hall’s new rooftop gardens, moot court room, auditorium, cafe, and flexible seminar and collaborative spaces have been thoughtfully designed to promote easy interaction among faculty, students, and staff, and to foster the collaborative scholarship for which Penn Law is widely known. Check out the Golkin Hall Project blog.

Ribbon Cutting ceremony: April 5, 2012, with guest speaker, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

The renovated and expanded Music Building on 34th street boasts acoustically-isolated classrooms, offices, and practice rooms, with recording studios and a computer lab that raises the bar for technology in the music department. It will also encourage more student-faculty interaction, and open up music and performance to the entire Penn community. more >

Ready for Spring Term 2010, it's also the first "green" academic building on campus. Many aspects of the construction process were environmentally-conscious and the building itself features sun shades and operable windows to minimize air conditioning needs.

The Penn Libraries Special Collections Center will transform the Library's sixth floor, home of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The plans include a dramatic reading terrace overlooking College Green and a large communal space for public lectures and events. The new design will also provide unparalleled access to — and crucial curatorial care for — the Library's rare holdings, with much-needed additional classrooms, new galleries, and a digital media lab. New consultation areas will foster interaction between curators and scholars, and Penn professors will have more chances to expose students to the rich stores of primary research materials there. more >

It's all part of the forward-looking vision for world class libraries like Penn's: the library as the intellectual commons of the 21st century.

The Annenberg Public Policy Center's new home opened November 4, 2009. With its double-skinned glass and wood exterior -- designed to complement the nearby buildings and to conserve energy -- the state-of-the-art facility will not only bring together the APPC's many programs, but also provide welcome new space for public debates, lectures, and conferences. architectural critic's review >

The building came about through a $42 million gift from the Annenberg Foundation and the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands. The Annenbergs founded the APPC in 1993 to generate scholarship that translates research in communication, information, and the media into real-world applications.

The roof terrace of Kings Court English College house is covered in vegetation! A green roof, in which the roof area of a building is covered in plants and the soil in which they grow, is an ecologically sensitive and sustainable construction method which benefits both the building and the environment. more >

Go Green in the College Houses is Penn’s environmental sustainability initiative in residences. Its mission is to increase awareness of waste reduction, energy conservation, and best practices for living a sustainable lifestyle at Penn.

When the Roberts Proton Therapy Center -- the largest and most advanced proton therapy facility in the world -- was dedicated in November, 2009, a revolution in cancer care began.

One of only six such centers in the country and the only one located between Florida and Boston, the 75,000 square foot facility is the first of its kind to be fully integrated with all forms of cancer care -- surgery, chemotherapy, standard radiotherapy -- and embedded within an academic medical center, making the Center the world's most advanced proton therapy center, treating over 3,000 patients a year and advancing medical science.

At Penn, the power of transformation is perhaps most visible at Penn Park -- asphalt parking lots that once belonged to the Postal Service have now become verdant parks and playing fields, where pedestrians strolling on elevated walkways will enjoy stunning views of the skyline above and Penn Park below.

"This is the first time that Penn, by design, has acquired land that will remain as open space, which has tremendous environmental benefits for our campus and the city," said President Gutmann. "At the same time, Penn Park will dramatically enhance our athletic and recreational amenities."

Penn Park features four athletic fields and a dozen tennis courts, framed by tree-topped berms interspersed with benches. Throughout the park, native-species meadow grasses will diversify and beautify the landscape and provide a natural habitat for flora and fauna. An innovative storm-water management system will capture and divert rain water in underground cells to supply the site's irrigation system. The Park will also reduce Penn's carbon footprint by increasing total green space by 24 percent.

Penn Park connects to Penn's existing athletic fields, and, by way of the green gateway created by Shoemaker Green and Weiss Pavilion, connects to the campus.

Penn Park

: Groundbreaking

: Adams Field is named

: Penn Park opens

George A. Weiss Pavilion. Built into the iconic archways of Franklin Field's northern arcade, the 51,000-square-foot George A. Weiss Pavilion and the Robert A. Fox Recreation Fitness Center is a magnet for intercollegiate athletes and fitness buffs, encouraging the migration of Penn students to the eastern side of campus.

Eventually, as the tennis courts in front of the Palestra are relocated (to Penn Park's Clay W. Hamlin Outdoor Tennis Center) and Shoemaker Green takes form there, the familiar athletic and academic precinct on 33rd Street will be infused with new life -- both recreational and social.

The Wiess Pavilion is targeted for a minimum of LEED Silver Certification.

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Shoemaker Green's expanse of lush grass, tree-lined walkways, and plant beds are planned to spread out in front of the beloved Palestra, replacing the paved tennis courts, which have been relocated to Penn Park.

Previously classified as a "grey field" where storm water drainage was a major problem, the 3.75-acre site was chosen as one of the nation's pilot projects for the Sustainable Sites Initiative to test sustainable landscape design. Once completed, the $8 million project will feature three rain gardens, porous pavers, a cistern for rainwater reuse, and plantings of native species -- all of which will help capture and control storm water, reduce the urban heat island effect, and increase local biodiversity.

For all of us, Shoemaker Green will become a perfect spot for casual weekday lunches, frisbee-playing, or quiet reading and studying. And on Penn Family Day, Homecoming, or Alumni Weekend, the Green will come alive with another kind of energy, large enough for tented special events and other celebrations -- think: Commencement, Quaker football, Penn Relays.

The state-of-the-art Palestra floor, installed in 2008, not only provides a safer surface for today’s stronger and faster athletes, but also hints at the many athletic and recreational improvements in store for the entire Penn community through the Making History campaign.

Through Making History, we are re-imagining the campus by creating the open space and playing fields that will beautify our environment and enrich the Penn experience for students, alumni, faculty, and staff.

Securing support for the construction of new facilities and the renovation of existing ones is our single largest campaign priority in terms of dollars. The role of state-of-the-art, welcoming, and inspiring spaces in the creation of knowledge and exchange of ideas cannot be overstated, especially for an urban campus like Penn .The best facilities power the potential of technology-intensive fields, attract top-notch students and scholars, and enhance the ecology and overall quality of life and work at Penn -- life and work which ultimately improves the city, region, and world beyond.

Making History will invest strategically in the physical plant of the University, equipping Penn with the 21st-century campus our students, faculty, and staff need and deserve, while carrying out the first steps in our Penn Connects plan.

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