The Philadelphia School and the Future of Architecture

John Lobell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032015231
• eBook ISBN: 9781000626933
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Flourishing from 1951 to 1965, the Philadelphia School was an architectural golden age that saw a unique convergence of city, practice, and education, all in renewal. And it was a bringing together of architecture, city and regional planning, and landscape architecture education under the leadership of Dean G. Holmes Perkins.

During that time at the architecture school at the University of Pennsylvania (known as the Graduate School of Fine Arts or GSFA), Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi were transforming modern architecture; Romaldo Giurgola was applying continental philosophy to architectural theory; Robert Le Ricolais was building experimental structures; Ian McHarg was questioning Western civilization and advancing urban and regional ecology; Herbert Gans was moving into Levittown; and Denise Scott Brown was forging a syncretism of European and American planning theory and discovering popular culture. And in the city, Edmund Bacon was directing the most active city planning commission in the country.

This book describes the history of the school, the transformation of the city of Philadelphia, and the philosophy of the Philadelphia School in the context of other movements of the time, and looks at what the Philadelphia School has to offer to architecture today and in the future, all from the point of view of a student who was there.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178958-1

In which we get an overview of how the Philadelphia School was a confluence of city, practice, and education, each undergoing renewal

1.1. First Recognition

In the April 1961 issue of Progressive Architecture, Jan Rowan presented “Wanting to Be The Philadelphia School.”¹ “Wanting to be,” of course, came from Louis Kahn’s “What does this building want to be?”² “The Philadelphia School” was the first outside identification of what was to become a fertile source of subsequent architecture. The Philadelphia School is today primarily identified with Louis Kahn (1901–1974) and Robert Venturi (1925–2018), but while both are important, overemphasizing them misses the point of a unique convergence of city, practice, and education, each undergoing renewal, all serving as a backdrop for the growth of maturing personalities and the evolution of a comprehensive approach to architecture from regional ecology to city planning to urban design to understanding institutions to meaning to buildings to construction to details. All within philosophical, social, and cultural perspectives, and all having something to offer us today.

The Philadelphia School began in 1951 when G. Holmes Perkins assumed the deanship of the Graduate School of Fine Arts (GSFA) at the University of Pennsylvania.³ However, it had roots in the political, architectural, and planning efforts to renew Philadelphia, which were signaled by the nationally reported Better Philadelphia Exhibition of 1947 in Gimbels department store. It ended in … it’s hard to say. Robert Geddes, a key Philadelphia School figure and later dean of architecture at Princeton, says it ended in 1965 (Geddes, Romaldo Giurgola, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and others left Penn around then), but some say 1974, when Kahn died.

It was a “golden age” when students chose between Robert Geddes, Romaldo Giurgola, George Qualls, and Robert Venturi for their studio critics (the choice varied a bit from year to year and each taught with a colleague); Kahn and Venturi were transforming architecture; Robert Le Ricolais was building experimental structures; Karl Linn was applying Zen Buddhism to architecture and pioneering vest pocket parks; Paul Davidoff was raising the issue of poverty and developing advocacy planning; David Crane was working on the capital web; Ian McHarg was questioning progress in Western civilization and advancing urban and regional ecology; Herbert Gans was moving into Levittown; Denise Scott Brown was forging a syncretism of European and American planning and discovering popular culture; and Edmund Bacon was directing the most active planning commission in the country.

But while the architecture program is central to this book, we need to keep in mind that during this time at Penn, McHarg was leading the strongest landscape architecture program in the country, and Robert Mitchell was leading the strongest city planning program in the country.

1.2. Synergy and Convergence

Philadelphia has several strong architectural traditions, including William Penn’s five squares; Frank Furness’s personal muscular Victorian mannerism, a gentile style of country house of the 1920s; the diagonal Benjamin Franklin Parkway; the PSFS Building (the first International Style skyscraper); and bricks. However, by the late 1930s, it had experienced decades of single-party machine rule (mostly corrupt), which had left it in both physical and spiritual decay: “Second prize, two weeks in Philadelphia.”

When Joseph Clark was elected reform mayor in 1952, Edmund Bacon (who had begun to meet with energetic young citizens to plot reform starting in 1939) was Director of the City Planning Commission. Bacon’s approach led to Philadelphia’s vital and continually developing Center City,⁴ where each project provided impetus for the eventual implementation of neighboring projects. This comprehensiveness contrasts with such monster renewal projects isolated from their surroundings as Detroit’s Renaissance Center and Albany’s Empire State Plaza, and with the scattered and chaotic processes in New York that we have seen since Robert Moses exited the scene.

The Philadelphia School saw multiple levels of relationships between city, school, and profession. Bacon, the Director of the City Planning Commission, was on the GSFA faculty; the dean of the school, G. Holmes Perkins, was the chairman of the City Planning Commission; several young architects, establishing practices in the city and teaching at the school, were doing research and design projects for the Planning Commission; and most of the projects in studio at the school were sited in the city. And all of these, the city, the profession, and the school, were in a state of renewal. Like the city, the school had also experienced a decline, and its revitalization was undertaken by Perkins. Many of the people we interviewed for this book began with, “Of course, it was Perkins’s School.”

During the 1910s and 20s, Penn was widely considered the best school in the country under the deanship of Warren Laird and his lead critic, the Beaux-Arts master, Paul Philippe Cret. Later, George Koyl became Dean and remained until 1951, by which time there was pressure, including student unrest, for a change from the Beaux-Arts tradition Koyl had maintained. While other schools had long since shifted to modern architecture, Penn had tried to build on the old. It was a dead end. In 1951, Perkins, who was brought from Harvard, became the new dean with a clear idea of what he wanted to accomplish.

During the period under discussion, Philadelphia also saw a renewal in the architectural profession. The city had had figures of architectural importance in the past: Frank Furness, Paul Philippe Cret, George Howe, Oscar Stonorov, and Vincent Kling, among many others. But in the 1960s, the city blossomed with new offices, some of which were to become major forces in American architecture: Kahn; Geddes, Brecher, Qualls, and Cunningham; Mitchell/Giurgola; Venturi and various partners; Wallace, McHarg, Roberts, and Todd; Bower and Fradley; etc. These offices put into practice the ideas being developed at the school, and most faculty members were also practitioners. (My apologies to the many I have left out.)

1.3. Today’s Golden Age

We are today in a golden age of architecture, as announced by Frank Gehry’s “Let the experience begin!” The curving titanium of Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, Tom Wright’s billowing sail of his Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai, Zaha Hadid’s sharp angles of her Phæno Science Center in Wolfsburg, Herzog & de Meuron’s woven steel of their “Bird’s Nest” for the Beijing National Olympic Stadium, and Santiago Calatrava’s soaring structure of his World Trade Center Transportation Hub in New York all attest to this new age. But what happened to the visions for a new understanding of the human place in the world, for a new society, central to the pioneers of modern architecture, including Mies, Corbu, and Gropius?⁵ At the end of this book, we will look at what the Philadelphia School might have to offer for a larger vision of architecture today.

1.4. The Philadelphia School in Context

In the preface, I listed some of the movements in architecture of the 1960s and ’70s, but seven came to dominate: design methods, the social sciences, radical technology, historicism, semiology, postmodernism, and formalism. Note that these categories are somewhat arbitrary, as we are dealing with tangles of hairballs, and these very brief overviews are probably unfair to each.

1.4.1. Design Methods

The Beaux-Arts provided a comprehensive and learnable approach to architecture. One mastered the elements (the classical orders, formal layouts, etc.) and studied precedents (if one were doing a library, one might look at Boullée’s Projet pour la Bibliothèque du Roi), applying them to one’s own project.

But how to proceed in modern architecture? Should one follow Gropius and design from a program? Corbu and use his five points? Mies and create a universal space? Facing a blank sheet of paper can be disconcerting, and many got lost, so when Christopher Alexander published Notes on the Synthesis of Form in 1964, the field of design methodologies was born, and the Design Methods Group (DMG) and other organizations were founded. Alexander eventually regretted the impact of Notes and followed it with A Pattern Language in 1977. Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) conferences would hold Pattern Language sessions, drawing legions of devout followers clutching their copies of the book. The design methods movement had many variants but basically promised a series of “algorithmic” steps which would produce a building. School after school added design methods to their curricula until it was realized that design methods had failed to produce any buildings, and the movement fizzled.

1.4.2. The Social Sciences

We need to recall that modern architecture included strong commitments to social reforms—attacks on capitalism and individualism and promises of a new person and a new world. Much of that social agenda was lost when modern architecture came to the US and got caught up in the postwar boom, but in 1962, Michael Harrington published The Other America, and awareness of social ills spread in various disciplines, including architecture. In 1961 we saw the publication of Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities with its questioning of public housing projects. Once heralded as slum clearance, the projects began to be perceived as architectural horrors and socially destructive. Some architects looked to psychology and sociology for guides to more humane spaces, and psychologists and sociologists began to encroach on architecture. The Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) and other organizations were formed.

In response to this, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) commissioned Robert Geddes (who had left Penn to become dean of architecture at Princeton) and Bernard Spring to make a proposal for how architectural education might respond. In 1967 they produced A Study of Education for Environmental Design. In its introduction, we read, “Emerging from the study was a process for planning and evaluating the unprecedented diversity of new programs that are needed if teams of well-educated individuals are to develop who can work together and effectively design a more humane environment.”⁶

The architecture world was abuzz with the observation that the title and much of the report referred to environment design rather than to architecture. The modernists had called on architects to throw themselves into the hands of the engineers. Now they were being called on to throw themselves into the hands of the social scientists.

1.4.3. Historicism

For much of history, architecture and the other arts, indeed all of life, had been built on the past. The Enlightenment sought to replace the past with science and reason as means for understanding and acting on our world and ourselves. We might see modern architecture as bringing the Enlightenment to architecture. The design of a building would come not from precedent, but from its use, its structure, and its materials. The limitations of this approach eventually became apparent; thus, the Philadelphia School and the movements briefly described here. One response was to return to looking to the past. We see this in Kahn who would reference Corbu in saying that we should learn from the principles of the past, not imitate its forms, and we also see it in Venturi as filtered through his mannerist lens. There are many other examples, and more on Kahn and Venturi later.

1.4.4. Radical Technology

Launched in the early 1960s by a group of students at the Architectural Association in London, Archigram asked, what if we see buildings as temporary attachments to urban infrastructure, and what if we take that infrastructure into three dimensions? The result was spectacular drawings, some of which were shown at the GSFA around 1964. In the late 1960s, Bucky Fuller’s geodetic domes provided inspiration for domes and zomes at communes. In 1977, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano used imagery reminiscent of Archi-gram’s in their Pompidou Centre (which shares the organization, or “Form,” of Kahn’s Salk Institute); and in 1971, Disney implemented Archigram’s plug-in technology in the Contemporary Resort at Disney World (extensively reported on to the architectural community by Peter Blake).

We see structural adventurism in Kahn’s work, including his 1944 drawing for a reinterpretation of a Gothic cathedral as a community center in welded steel and plastic, the tetrahedron ceiling of his 1951 Yale Art Gallery, his City Tower Project of 1952–57 done with Anne Tyng, and his Vierendeels of 1957 for Richards and 1962 for Salk. And we also see it in Robert Le Ricolais’s elegant structural experiments.

1.4.5. Semiology

Semiology is an approach to language based on the work of the Swiss linguist, semiotician, and philosopher Ferdinand de Saussure. A linguistic approach to architecture should...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Philadelphia
• 3 The School
• 4 Philosophies of the Philadelphia School
• 5 Philadelphia School Buildings
• 6 The Philadelphia School and the Future of Architecture
• 7 Epilogue: My Education
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index