 |
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
THE ARCHITECTURE ISSUE
The Chronicle Review's yearly look at architecture examines buildings on and off campuses. Above, Caltech's new Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, designed by Morphosis. (Chronicle photograph by Lawrence Biemiller)
Other News
U. of Tennessee Landmark to Move to Nearby Location
New campus buildings
Multimedia
Pomona's Skyspace
The artist James Turrell turned a Pomona College courtyard into a work of art worth waking up at dawn for.
Subscribe
Subscribe to Buildings & Grounds in a feed reader.
Get the Buildings & Grounds widget for Facebook, Myspace, or your own blog.
About Buildings & Grounds
Buildings & Grounds is written by Scott Carlson (left) and Lawrence Biemiller (right). Scott Carlson writes about architecture, facilties, energy, and sustainability, among other topics. Lawrence Biemiller writes about architecture and facilities and contributes to Notes from Academe. What's happening on your campus? Let us know.
Pa. Academy of the Fine Arts Makes Good Use of 11-Story Auto-Assembly Building
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is renovating an 11-story industrial building across Cherry Street from its 1876 main building
Philadelphia — Painting, sketching, printmaking, sculpture — there’s plenty of work in progress at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the museum and art school that has been a Philadelphia fixture since 1805. But the academy’s biggest project is the continuing renovation of an 11-story building constructed 90 years ago as an assembly and storage facility and showroom for the Gomery-Schwartz Motor Car Company.
 |
Now known as the Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building, after a longtime trustee of the academy, the structure is located on North Broad Street just across Cherry Street from the academy’s landmark main building, a polychrome extravaganza designed by Frank Furness and completed in 1876. The plainer Hamilton Building, designed by Charles Oelschlager, has limestone pilasters on its three lower floors, and above that a facade of yellow brick.
The academy has owned the Hamilton Building since 1999, and has been renovating it floor by poured-concrete floor — the fourth and fifth floors are still awaiting their turns. The renovations are being overseen by Dagit Saylor Architects.
The 300,000-square-foot building’s heavy-duty, industrial-scale construction makes it just about perfect for the art school’s 300 students. Ceilings are supported by large round columns with plain but attractive rounded capitals. Between the columns are open spaces big enough for classrooms, studios (many doubling as garages for students’ bikes), and — on the seventh floor — sculpture facilities that include a plaster-casting room and a foundry. Special ventilation equipment was installed to meet the air-safety needs of the foundry and the printmaking studios on the sixth floor.
On the 10th floor, north-facing skylights bring in the even light sought by painters. The 11th floor — smaller than the others because of the skylights and air-conditioning equipment — has an outdoor roof deck, and a student lounge with a piano and a ping-pong table. A freight elevator can lift heavy items to any level of the building, while two banks of smaller elevators serve passengers from west-facing lounges on each floor that double as galleries and social spaces. Big windows in the exterior walls flood the building with daylight.
The lower floors are reserved for more-public purposes. The third floor houses school offices and a library, while the first two floors are devoted to spacious public galleries with simple walls but beautifully detailed ceilings. A sweeping modern staircase connects the two floors. The first floor also houses a gift shop.
Jeff Carr, the school’s dean of academic affairs, says students and faculty members are happy to be under one roof, instead of spread out among neighborhood buildings. The Hamilton Building will eventually be linked to the Furness building, he says, by a tunnel under Cherry Street, which is due to be turned into a pedestrian plaza as an expansion of the Philadelphia Convention Center is constructed on the opposite side of Broad Street. —Lawrence Biemiller
The academy’s main building, by Frank Furness, still houses first-year drawing classes and others (Chronicle photographs by Lawrence Biemiller)
Comments
Previous: Harvard U. Agrees to Legal Limits on Emissions for New Complex
Next: Shop Talk: Wider Beds, Free Water, and a Very Large Housing Complex
Really good idea. Anything to preserve buildings built before the 1960’s. Everything afterward? Bulldoze and start over.
— marci Sep 18, 04:59 PM #