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Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
How she picked you from a line up in downtown Philadelphia with a cigarette hanging out of your mouth and Henry Miller in your back pocket
A walking tour at the University of Pennsylvania took us in and around the two most architecturally significant buildings on campus (sorry, everything else), starting with the Fisher Fine Arts Library designed by Frank Furness.
And in case you were wondering, the full quote on the window in the first picture is from Samuel Daniell's poem Musophilus and it reads: “O blessed letters! That combine in one all ages past and make one live with all. By you we do confer with who are gone and the dead- living unto counsel call.” I’m guessing that when Sam wrote that back in 1599, he wasn’t planning on it being memorialized in a quote in a Frank Furness designed library in a part of the world that was still 80 years away from being found(ed). Or maybe he was. Who can say for sure.
The other architecturally significant building at Penn is the Richards Medical Building designed by Philadelphia hero architect Louis Kahn and the building that really got his career going. Of course that career ended up with him being a bigamist who notoriously ran a money losing firm and ended up with him being found (and unclaimed) dead on the floor of the mens room in Penn Station New York, possibly the worst place on earth. In between all of those bad parts, Kahn created buildings that architects like me love (because of their use of materials and space and light) and that non architects tend to walk right on by.
Louis Kahn was not really known for his private house designs, but maybe if he designed a few more like this one that would all change. This is the Esherick House out in Chestnut Hill, a small, highly efficient house that is all wood and concrete and oh so carefully thought out windows and balconies.
While most people would not know of the Esherick House, it held special meaning for me as it was a big part of my early architectural education. In my first year architectural graphics class, this was the building that I first learned how to draw in a two point perspective. Those deep windows and that offset chimney and that recessed balcony that doesn’t quite align with the roofline were all things that I was all too familiar with. Finally getting to see it in person and finally getting to stand inside something that I still remember so well all these years later meant more to me because of that class than I can honestly probably describe.
The Esherick House is located on Sunrise Lane, a block long dead end street in a nice, leafy residential neighborhood in Chestnut Hill in Northwestern Philadelphia. At the other end of that block, where the Sunrise Lane starts at Millman Street is another house designed by a famous architect. Robert Venturi’s mother’s house (or the Vanna Venturi House) is an icon of postmodernism and a world famous architectural monument. In that same first year class when I drew two point perspectives of the Esherick House, I also went on a field trip where our fearless professor had us standing on the lawn looking into the windows of this house where (thankfully) no one was home to call the police on us. Today there are chains across the driveway and signs all over the place warning architects to stay away, but luckily from just the right angle you can cut off all of those warning signs and imagine a clear path to standing on the lawn and once again looking into the windows before the police show up.
One of the AIA tours was called Gilded Age Philadelphia, which was really an excuse to walk around Center City on Market and Broad Street looking at buildings and learning what you can between finding good angles to take pictures. In the past in Miami or New Orleans this would have been a self guided tour instead of the far better, architect guided experience that I had.
As for pictures, there is a minor tragedy that happened to my camera at this very location, under City Hall in the rain. After taking hundreds and hundreds of pictures over four days with my beloved Sony RX-100 M4 camera, the MicroSDHC card suddenly stopped working without warning, (unless you count that last one that said it stopped working I guess). This was just the start of a drawn out storyline that involved a Sony data recovery center in Austin, Texas and hope that faded ever so slowly away. All of those hundreds and hundreds of pictures are gone forever, a tragedy of such simultaneously epic and slight consequence that it's still kind of hard to process.
So while several hundred pictures may be gone forever, some ghosts in the machine remain. As a practice, I'll often transfer pictures from my beloved Sony RX-100 M4 to my iPhone to email or post. This allowed for a version of some pictures to live on. So when you see this picture of City Hall in the rain, I still see all of the other missing pictures of the same view but from slightly different angles, pictures that remain forever lost in time.
Slideshows can only be so long, and there are only so many pictures of Philadelphia that anyone ever really needs to see. With that sudden (and honestly otherwise not yet observed) concern for your emotional well being, several of the many tours I attended are not pictured. I took a guided tour of Rittenhouse Square that took us all the way to the Schuylkill River, another separate tour that took us inside a Passive House and renovated rowhouses, and took a “construction tour” of the new Norman Foster designed Comcast Tower that involved looking at it from across the street. All of the tours (even the last one) were good and all had some value, although none of them necessarily resulted in the best pictures.
Instead we’ll head to Center City Philadelphia, in the area where all of the tall buildings like to hang out, and look up at all that glass and clouds and reflections and just for once try and enjoy the view.
The observation deck on the 57th floor of Helmut John's wannabe Chrysler Building isn't all that high by most any standard, but in Philadelphia it's like you're standing on top of the world. From that height you're looking down on William Penn at City Hall, down on the incredible Loews PSFS tower and down on everything else Philadelphia is famous for from the Duke & Duke Building to Paddy's Pub to the forlorn grave of Rocky Balboa. Only Robert Stern's Comcast Tower is taller, although just behind it a newer, nicer Comcast Tower by Norman Foster is already under construction and will soon tower over it all- until they decide in a few years to build even more, even taller third Comcast Towers I guess.
I often skip the AIA Convention keynotes unless the speaker is really interesting. Usually I would rather be on a tour or be out exploring on my own than sitting quietly in a room full of thousands of people trying not to check my phone every five minutes. Last year in Atlanta I broke my own rule and attended the keynote to hear former US President Bill Clinton speak- he was an incredibly engaging speaker but I’ll be damned if I can remember what he actually talked about. This year there was no celebrity or former US President, but instead celebrity architect Rem Koolhaas, Rem was not nearly as engaging a speaker as former US President Bill Clinton (not many people are), but despite a generally quiet voice and Dutch accent, the content of his words (and works) were far more memorable.
And here, to close out the Philadelphia AIA Convention pictures is Rem himself, patiently signing books outside the AIA Store. See you next year in Orlando for the 2017 AIA Convention, where we’ll all try really, really hard to see things that aren’t Disney related.
But wait, there’s more
I go to these AIA Conventions almost every year, meaning that there’s lots of slideshows and pictures and stories from all sorts of different cities, showing off their best architecture and design for all to see.
