Tour Richards Medical Research Laboratories with David Hollenberg

Richards Medical Research Laboratories, a breakthrough design by Louis Kahn and a National Historic Landmark, is one of the 20th century’s essential buildings. Upon its completion in 1962, innumerable accretions and partitions for wet lab research began to choke its interiors, obscuring the clarity of its lauded “served” and “servant” spaces, while also making it a profligate energy user.

The opportunity for its deep renovation emerged in 2012 when Penn issued a “Century Bond,” structured to fund projects where energy conservation and deferred maintenance converge, with energy savings paying the interest.

The phased restoration and rehabilitation projects those funds enabled, recently completed, will be described and discussed during the tour.

For those projects, beyond the inevitable trepidations about intervening in such a revered building, the overarching and interwoven challenges were:

• retaining scientific use and
• achieving the energy savings the Bond necessitated while
• maintaining and restoring the building’s profound power