Building Stories: Time and Change at Weitzman Hall

Building Stories: Time and Change at Weitzman Hall brings together original architectural drawings and lithographs and period and contemporary photographs to explore the many lives of the building designed by Cope and Stewardson as one half of the Foulke and Long Institute for Orphaned Girls.

Completed in 1892 and acquired by Penn in 1899, the original school building (now Stuart Weitzman Hall) was lightly altered over the next 125 years, first for use as a physics laboratory (1900-1954), then as the academic home for Penn’s School of Nursing (1955-1979), before finally housing the studio art programs of the School of Design (1980-2024). In 2022, KieranTimberlake was engaged to renovate and expand the building through a process architect Stephen Kieran describes as the art of renewal, “creating a dialogue of material respect and admiration between the old form and new purpose.”

Informed by research completed by graduate students in the Department of Historic Preservation for a Spring 2024 course, the story of Weitzman Hall invites us to reconsider how institutions confront aging buildings and forces of urbanization—and to contemplate how architecture can endure these challenges by taking on new roles, functions and meanings beyond what its designers originally intended.

The exhibition is organized by Susie Dole and William Whitaker of the Architectural Archives, in collaboration with KieranTimberlake, John Hinchman, and Joseph Elliott.