“It seems safe to say that Meyerson Hall, home to Penn’s School of Design, has never in its 60 years of existence been what could be called an iconic design,” a narrator stated bluntly at the start of a new fundraising video for a comprehensive overhaul of the University of Pennsylvania’s architecture school. It seems no one is particularly fond of the boxy concrete building built in 1967 by Martin, Stewart, Noble & Class Architects, whose four namesakes graduated from the school. “Let’s just say that it didn’t come from one of the great periods of American architecture,” Marilyn Jordan Taylor, dean of the School of Design, said in the video.
Philadelphia-based Erdy McHenry Architecture (EM) has been working to overhaul Meyerson Hall and build a glassy addition on the structure’s north side, a prominent pedestrian entrance to campus at 34th and Walnut streets.
“The value in that building is the embodied energy it represents. We looked at the building as a blank canvas,” Principal Scott Erdy, who also teaches at PennDesign, told AN. “Aesthetically it’s not particularly nice, but it’s a concrete building that’s durable for a school of architecture. We came in to figure out a way to get something that was fundable and constructible without displacing the school.”
Wrapping around the north side of Meyerson, the addition’s crystalline curtain wall is punctuated by moveable pin-up walls that slide behind the glass, creating a mosaic on the building’s facade. It cantilevers over a monumental stair leading to a second floor “commons” flanked by gallery space and a café. “When you get to the top of that stair, the view down the whole side of the building frames the apse of the Fischer Fine Arts Library, the studio where [Louis] Kahn taught,” Erdy said. On the ground floor, a planned fab lab will open the school to an outdoor work area, sculpture studio, and bike parking.
“It’s a light and glassy piece that leads you in—the angle of the glass brings the scale down to the pedestrian level as you move into the campus green,” Erdy noted, adding that the glass facade will let in natural light on the building’s north side. “Even though it’s an expansion of the building, it’s going to be less heavy than what’s already there.”
Over the past three summers, Erdy’s team has been renovating studio space on the second, third, and fourth floors and fortifying Meyerson’s mechanical systems. “We’ve been working very hard to make the renovation happen within an occupied building,” Erdy said.
The new Meyerson Hall is all about collaboration in a school spread out over six buildings. “We’re trying to create a center for PennDesign,” he said. “The idea is that the building really becomes a focal point for the school.” The school includes sculpture, planning, architecture, and landscape among its programs. “The biggest thing we’ve been able to achieve is to make it more interdisciplinary,” Erdy said.
Old studios were clustered into hermetic “cubbies” that made teaching difficult. In an age of technology and rapid prototyping informing design education, Erdy essentially turned the building’s original scheme inside out to create flexible and free-flowing studios. Instead of specialized and compartmentalized spaces, new studios foster an open, interdisciplinary approach.
Each studio now has its own pin-up spaces capable of digital projection and a series of 3D printers are located in the studios. “The key with technology is to not let it get in the way of your process,” Erdy said. “We wanted technology that is seamless—that you don’t even think about. It’s exciting to see how fast something can be prototyped in the studio. We’re setting up the infrastructure in the building to make that happen.”