by Ian Ford
The University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education (GSE) is a leader in education, developing leaders, and training educators to solve 21st-century educational challenges locally and around the world. The school’s mission focuses on education in urban areas, especially in the city of Philadelphia. The GSE’s center for innovation – Catalyst @ Penn – brings education, business, and technology together to generate, test, adapt, and disseminate best practices and powerful new tools for educators at all levels.
The new entrance lobby provides universal access and has become the heart of the GSE.
Over time, the GSE’s programs grew significantly, with faculty and programs dispersed around West Philadelphia. The GSE had doubled in size since its last building renovation over 20 years ago, and students needed additional space to accommodate new collaborative modes of learning and working. The original GSE building and adjacent Stiteler Hall had been designed in the 1960s with their entrances facing inward to a cloistered courtyard and away from the city and campus. To realize their modern mission, the GSE required new collaborative student spaces, state-of-the-art instructional facilities supporting current and evolving teaching pedagogies and learning styles, more access and connectivity, and a centralized facility to maximize engagement between faculty, students, and researchers.
The upper lobby connects the original GSE building to Stiteler and the new courtyard addition.
Leveraging the school’s most valuable resources – existing space and buildings – the design developed by Annum Architects reorients the buildings toward the campus and city through the introduction of three modestly sized additions that create a single, connected GSE complex. The additions are designed to connect and enhance existing spaces by creating visual connections to the outside. The new lobby connects the two existing buildings at three levels, provides full accessibility to the complex, and connects the main campus walkway to the courtyard one level above. In the lobby, original building facades have been preserved and now define interior space, conveying the buildings’ history and reuse.
Three discrete additions connect the complex to make “One Penn GSE.”
The 16,900sf renovation and 16,200sf expansion of the original GSE building and Stiteler Hall create “One Penn GSE,” providing universal accessibility and a new home for students, faculty, scholars and researchers, and education leaders and professionals. With a new facade facing the city and a new entrance facing the campus, the project creates a gateway to education that expands access and connectivity, making Penn GSE a resource for the entire university.
Former Dean Pam Grossman said, “It came out even better than we could have imagined, really. This vision of bringing together the buildings, how it has created this entry into GSE which is so different and so welcoming, it’s remarkable. Part of what makes me so happy is that it creates a space where people are all under the same roof. There are so many spaces for people to get together and to run into each other and meet and talk and dream and plan. It fulfilled that dream of having a building that would bring our community together.”
Ian Ford
Ian Ford, AIA, LEED AP is architect at Annum Architects (formerly Ann Beha Architects).
