Ugly American Studies building

My first thought was to raise hell with PECO. After studying abroad last semester, I returned to find the northeast corner of 34th and Walnut streets occupied by a faux-Georgian utility closet in red brick that could only be an electrical substation. Who had let this poorly dressed piece of infrastructure onto Hill Field?

Going inside revealed no humming capacitors but an entry hall with fiberglass columns, hastily applied moldings and factory copies of period furniture. Perhaps it wasn't PECO's work at all but a successful suburban car dealer who had bucked up Penn's sagging endowment in exchange for dumping his McMansion on campus.

It turns out that the building houses a high-caliber academic enterprise, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies (not a University department but a consortium of mostly local universities, including Penn). It is named for Tylenol inventor Robert McNeil, who has showered educational philanthropy all over Philadelphia. But despite this noble pedigree, the face the McNeil Center presents to the campus and the city is a mask of cynical cheapness and an unqualified embarrassment to the university.

It's one thing for a university to countenance a bad building on its campus; quite another to do so on its front doorstep.

Pedestrians approaching along Woodland Walk are now welcomed to one of America's most architecturally distinguished campuses by a misaligned brick box with PVC windows, and because of this it is now cruelly apparent what an important site the McNeil Center occupies. That the building rejects its responsibility is particularly galling since its neighbors, what are now the Zeta Psi fraternity house and the Jaffe History of Art building, negotiate their triangular plots so well.

The intersection of 34th and Walnut streets is one of the most animated corners in Philadelphia, where the city and the University meet. Pedestrians stream along the Woodland Walk diagonal, passing in and out of campus through a scrum of hospital workers, latte jockeys and traffic cops. Shops, academic redoubts and food carts compete for attention with clear views of Center City and the new Cira Centre. It is exactly the sort of vitality that an urban university is supposed to foster.

The McNeil Center pulls itself back from the fray as though horrified, addressing itself to none of the busy thoroughfares but to the back of the Zeta Psi house. The only good that might come of this is for Early American Studies enrollments to skyrocket among the brothers or for distinguished colonial scholars to sneak over for a kegger. No one wants to deny a deserving group of scholars the institutional promised land of their own building, but the McNeil Center is so willfully ignorant of its site it has done uncommon harm to a university and a city.

As a home for scholars who have devoted themselves to the 18th and early 19th centuries, the center takes a shockingly crude approach to the period's architecture. Slapping a plain brick facade and Greek portico over concrete block and labeling it "Federalist" (an American term for Georgian) does not architecture make. Actually, the University's press material calls it "neo-Federalist" -- "neo-" apparently meaning "a poor excuse for."

But why even try to "neo-" an architecture that passed out of widespread use almost two centuries ago? The unadorned simplicity of the Georgian style was an aesthetic system, certainly, but also a means of satisfying building codes enacted by the English Parliament in the century following the Great Fire of 1666. London was expanding rapidly as nobles carved up their estates into the suburban subdivisions of their day, and the spare Georgian facade, usually lifted from widely available pattern books, let speculative builders throw up entire blocks quickly and cheaply.

In other words, the look of a Georgian building was a response to the requirements of a particular time and place. You don't need to go to London; just stroll down some of the grander blocks in Society Hill, to see that it excels in urban composition. It's dismaying that the McNeil Center's architect, Robert AM Stern Associates, could not guide the Center and its benefactor into a similar view of the city rooted in our own time and place.

Ian Baldwin is a third-year Master of Architecture candidate from New York.

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