If Walls Could Talk

A Trip Through The Engineering Complex

By Eduardo D. Glandt

As with all great engineering endeavors, an abundance of energy and imagination has shaped and reshaped Penn Engineering—and the facilities we inhabit—throughout our more than 150-year history. With fabulous new structures and artfully refurbished interiors, Penn Engineering today occupies a total of eight buildings, four of which constitute the core engineering complex. Whether you were here as a student three decades ago as I was—or even more recently than that—I wonder if you would recognize the campus if you landed here today.

Certainly you would recognize our flagship, the Towne Building, that heralded in a new era in engineering education when it opened at the turn of the century. This Grande Dame of the engineering complex—hard to miss at 33rd and Smith Walk—will serve as the starting point for our tour.

As you enter Towne from the bricked-paved, elm-shaded Smith Walk, the building’s stately interior—its high ceilings and broad marble corridors—will quickly take you back to your days at Penn. Here in this noble building, students learned engineering by “doing”—an idea so novel in 1906 when the building opened that sixteen senators traveled from Washington, D.C. for the dedication ceremonies. Few classrooms were planned into the design of Towne; instead, large spaces such as laboratories, drafting rooms, shops, and a foundry defined the new building.

Towne has changed considerably in the intervening century, and nowhere is that more apparent than in our computer resource center, affectionately known as the “fish bowl.” In the mid-seventies, this glass-enclosed room held a large mainframe computer with which we communicated by putting telephone handsets into an acoustic coupler, and students coveted the two minutes of time they were allotted on the CPU each semester. Today, time is limited only by the hours in a day, and students from across campus spend many of them on the flat screen desktops that line the tables in the room.

Continue past the fish bowl, and you will come to a corridor. Turn right. If you worked on the solar car when you were a student, you will expect to come to the garage at the end of the hallway. Instead you will enter a vibrant, light-filled café where people are sipping lattes and typing away on laptops. With saffron walls, high ceilings, and curvilinear panels, the Accenture Cyber Café is a visual delight, and the practical pleasures it affords—wireless connection, comfortable arm chairs and tables, and plenty of quick, healthy food and caffeinated beverages—have made this part of Towne the place of choice for students and faculty to meet, eat, study and socialize.

Take a small turn from the Cyber Café, you will soon find yourself gazing into a bright atrium that marks the beginning of Levine Hall. This new home for computer and information science has dramatically changed both the style and spirit of the engineering complex since it was dedicated just two years ago. The gloriously wide lobby, with its expansive glass walls and sculptural staircase, has become the obligatory space for school events—the kind of place that makes one wonder how we ever lived without it.

Levine has also closed the U-shaped engineering complex on the west side, and, with its dramatic facade on both the east and west, the building has not only changed how we see ourselves but how the world sees us. We like to call Levine our monochromatic “Mondrian” because its irregular lattice of panes is reminiscent of the geometric paintings by the noted Dutch artist. But these luminous panels are not just beautiful; they are transparent, inviting those on the outside to observe people circulating on the inside— creating, in effect, a living billboard for our school.

While standing in the atrium of Levine, looking through the magnificent glass wall that forms the east side of the building, you can imagine what the future holds. The Pender Laboratories building, which once connected Towne and Moore, is gone and going up in its place is another fabulous new facility—Skirkanich Hall, the new home for bioengineering. The 58,000 square foot research and teaching facility will provide state-of-the-art laboratory and office space and improve circulation through the Engineering complex. With Skirkanich on the east, Levine on the west, Moore on the north, and Towne on the south, the core engineering complex will form a quadrangle, allowing us for the first time to circulate freely among each other. At the center of it all will be the Quain Courtyard—the living room of the whole school—which will feature a fountain and a waterfall. (Yes, you read it correctly!) Visible from every building in the quadrangle, the Courtyard will serve in a sense as a visual reference point for locating oneself—the ultimate GPS within Engineering.

As you leave the atrium, you will travel down a corridor that ends at Levine’s entrance on Walnut Street. With the expansion of campus to the north, Walnut has become a vigorous and vibrant thoroughfare, and our big marquee entrance—elegantly noted as 3330 Walnut Street— assures that Penn Engineering is part of that activity, while offering all who visit a welcoming greeting.

At this point, go through the doors to the outside, where another engineering marvel will catch your eye. Secured to the northwest corner of Levine’s ground floor window are three large plasma screens. Every hour of every day, the screens dance with animated imagery, delighting passersby and hinting at the student work underway in our new technology hub—the Weiss Tech House. Located on Levine’s second floor, this undergraduate learning center is a “tinkerer’s haven,” a place where entrepreneurially minded students from all disciplines come together to develop, test, and market their technological innovations.

Enter Levine Hall again, and travel east at the first corridor. You may remember this section of the building as GRW, the Graduate Research Wing of the Moore School, but today it is part of Levine. The glass exterior of the old facility complements Levine beautifully, and, in a few years, the interior will as well. Floor by floor— from the top down—we are recreating the internal space to match precisely what is found in Levine.

Continue down the hallway and history will soon show itself to you again as you enter the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, where the digital revolution was born. Scores of undergraduates learned electrical engineering within these walls, but it was ENIAC—the world’s first electronic digital computer that blinked to life in the building’s basement—that secured Moore’s place in Penn’s history. Today, a dedicated room in Moore displays a portion of ENIAC, and many people each year make their way to the building to pay homage to it. Plans for completing our quadrangle, which includes linking Moore and Skirkanich, call for giving ENIAC the place of honor it deserves in a dedicated ENIAC Museum. As you leave Moore, you will find yourself on the corner of 33rd and Walnut Streets. Look south. With the construction of Skirkanich underway, your travels are limited—but the beauty of what is to come can be imagined.

Skirkanich will face east and, like Levine, will have a stunning facade—uniquely modern yet architecturally respectful of its historic neighbors. Massive glass panels, which tell the passerby that this is a high-tech building, will be balanced by Skirkanich’s brick, interestingly glazed in a dark-moss green. A grand entrance on 33rd Street will welcome all who visit, and one day will overlook what might be called the “Palestra Green”—a lush, landscaped expanse of green earth that will grow where the tennis courts now stand. Adjacent to the north side of the Palestra—and sure to benefit from the enhancements underway—is the red-bricked David Rittenhouse Laboratories, home to astronomy, physics, and mathematics, disciplines often partnered with engineering.

On the northeast corner of 33rd and Walnut you will see the commodious LRSM, otherwise known as the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter. This ample building, with very good “bones” but in need of some cosmetic intervention, houses Penn’s Materials Research Science and Engineering Center.

East on Walnut Street, the future awaits, with the purchase of the postal lands—24 acres of prime real estate strategically located between Penn and Center City. A parking lot just beyond LRSM on the north side of Walnut has been identified as a potential site for Penn Engineering’s nanotechnology facility, still in the very preliminary planning stages. If built, it will be the first friendly academic face that Penn will offer as you approach it on Walnut—our very own gateway to the campus.

Cross 34th Street and you will come to 3401 Walnut, an office building that would be easy to miss if not for the Starbucks on the ground floor. Our Institute for Research in Cognitive Science (IRCS), a joint initiative between Penn Engineering and the School of Arts and Sciences, is housed in this facility.

Cross over Walnut and head south on the west side of 34th Street. As you approach the Fisher Fine Arts Library on your right, look for the crosswalk in the road on your left, and follow it to the statue of Edgar Fahs Smith, which sits at the head of Smith Walk. To your right you will see the Roy and Diana Vagelos Laboratories, another one of our handsome new buildings, which we share with the School of Medicine. The Vagelos Lab was built in 1997 and houses several Chemical Engineering research groups and the Institute for Medicine and Engineering (IME).

As you continue east on Smith Walk, we return to where we started, with one last building to note—Hayden Hall, our sister building to the south of Towne. Built in 1895 for the dental school, Hayden is a magnificent “wedding cake” of a building, wonderful in every way on the outside, with soaring ceilings inside. Bioengineering, along with several School of Arts and Sciences programs, presently finds its home in Hayden, but that will change when Skirkanich opens early next year. What we imagine for the future of the building is yet another inspired plan—stunning auditoria, study rooms, places for students to meet, study and just simply hang out.

No description can do justice to the spaces occupied by Penn Engineering. This is something you must see for yourself. Whether you have only a short time to spare or are able to treat yourself to hours of exploration, our Alumni Relations Office (alumni@seas.upenn.edu) is ready to prepare the way for you. We look forward to making you part of the new image of Penn Engineering.