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Centro Tecnológico San Joaquín
Hauptman Woodward Institute, Structural Biology Research Center
Daniel L. Malone Engineering Center
The John Garside Building, Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre
Molecular Foundry
Skirkanich Hall
Zhangjiang Semiconductor Research Park
Joan and Joel Smilow Research Center Skirkanich Hall
Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects knit together a complex of science buildings with a bold centerpiece structure and varied open space.
In 1960, the University of Pennsylvania famously fostered the notion that laboratory buildings should be architectural landmarks— emphatic physical statements about the place of advanced scientific thinking within the university. Its Richards Medical Center by Louis Kahn opened that year to great fanfare. However, in spite Kahn’s vaunted “served” and “servant” spaces, the functioning of the medical center and its research laboratories left something to be desired. In designing Skirkanich Hall, which opened in 2006 for the university’s bioengineering department in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the New York firm of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects sought to create a lab building that would stand out but not compromise function. Emulating Kahn’s particular solution was not part of Williams and Tsien’s mission.
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Not only did the bioengineering department want to attract key researchers in this ever-expanding field, it needed to accommodate 380 undergraduate and 130 graduate students. In order to do so, the department required a new, 58,425-square-foot facility plus 12,000 square feet of renovated space in the adjoining buildings. Two teaching labs and 13 research labs, all designated “wet,” had to be included in the new structure, with two more teaching labs in the renovated spaces. Dry labs––those depending on computer research rather than chemical interactions––would stay for the most part in the department’s previous home, Hayden Hall.
The building was to be inserted into a 18,500-square-foot site between two redbrick engineering buildings belonging to the university’s historic district; one, Moore School, is devoted to the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering. Originally a factory for musical instruments, it was designed by Erskine and Morris in 1912, and renovated for an engineering school in 1926 by the venerated Beaux-Arts architect Paul Cret. Flanking Skirkanich Hall on the south, Towne Building, designed by Cope and Stewardson in 1906, houses the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, and the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Filling out the compound on the west is KieranTimberlake’s Levine Hall, completed in 2003 for computer sciences.
Williams and Tsien knit Skirkanich Hall into this enclave of buildings with a system of paths and internal courtyards that allows pedestrian circulation to flow unimpeded from the west to the east. In addition, students and faculty can perambulate through the connected buildings in a square doughnut formation, so that Skirkanich can be directly entered from Moore or Towne. By placing the lab spaces at the perimeter of each of the upper floors of the reinforced-concrete structure and pushing the front of the tower over the building line of the 33rd Street entrance, the architects gained sizable work and research areas. The bulk of the building is countermanded by its slightly angled facade that follows the bend along 33rd, and the treatment of the glass skin so it appears to be peeling away from the brick mass: These acid-etched glazed portions, with sandblasted and acid-etched spandrel panels, refer rather abstractly to Philadelphia’s own Queen Anne Revival shingle-and-bowed-window architecture.
Formal name of project: Skirkanich Hall
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Gross square footage: 58,425 new + 6478 renovated + 6000 cyard
Total construction cost: $32 million
Owner: University of Pennsylvania
Completion date: March 2007 (final), June 2006 (occupancy), October 2006 (dedication)
Architect:
Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects LLP
222 Central Park South Grd Floor
New York, NY 10019
212.582.2385
212.245.1984
www.twbta.com/
Want the full story? Read the entire article in our December 2007 issue.
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