Preservationists Fear for an Early Louis Kahn Building at Penn

Louis Kahn’s Richards Medical Research Laboratories has dazzled architects, even while it frustrated those who worked in the building. (Photo by Nate Umstead)

Preservationists would like to see the University of Pennsylvania restore a laboratory-building complex designed by Louis Kahn, according to a story in The Daily Pennsylvanian.

The preservation group Save Our Sites recently sponsored a tour of the Richards Medical Research Laboratories, which opened in 1961. Penn is planning a good deal of new construction, the article says, and preservationists are worried that the Modernist building will be torn down in the process. The Richards Laboratories were among the earliest works to bring attention to Kahn, who later won acclaim for the Salk Institute of Biological Studies (1966) and the Yale Center for British Art (1974).

All of this fuss might be unfounded. Ron Ozio, a spokesman for Penn, told The Chronicle that there are no plans to tear down the Richards Laboratories.

The building might be lauded architecturally, but whether the building is functionally successful has always been a matter of debate. It seems that Kahn fit the mold of “starchitect” early on. In an article in The Pennsylvania Gazette, George E. Thomas, a scholar in historic preservation, said that Britton Chance, the chairman of the biophysics and chemistry department in the 1950s, told Kahn what he wanted in the building. Kahn ignored him.

“Instead, [Kahn] went off in this direction that we find enormously intriguing architecturally, and it has been a landmark building around the world because of the definitions and forms that Kahn found,” Mr. Thomas said. “But people that have worked there have never been happy with it.”