Following a successful fundraising campaign, this summer, over 80 students and 30 faculty members representing almost every Weitzman program—including architecture, environmental building design, landscape architecture, city planning, urban spatial analytics, fine arts, preservation, and Integrated Product Design—and several labs are working on projects that are led by PennPraxis or led by faculty and supported by PennPraxis.
Housing affordability is a growing issue for Pennsylvanians, and renters, low-income households and minorities are disproportionately burdened by housing costs, according to a study shared online today by the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency. The Pennsylvania Comprehensive Housing Study, as it’s called, was co-authored by Vincent Reina, assistant professor of city and regional planning and faculty director of the Housing Initiative at Penn (HIP), HIP Director Claudia AIken, and city and regional planning students Jane Christen and Jason Schunkewitz, in collaboration with the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency.
Last spring, PennPraxis was hired by the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission to collaborate on the creation of a 25-year plan for the Lehigh Valley. A team of student and alum Design Fellows led by Ellen Neises, adjunct associate professor of landscape architecture and executive director of PennPraxis, produced a series of designs that would enhance the region’s ecological health and quality of life.
Photo courtesy DWRCC
On October 17, the public is invited to join the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation (DRWC), the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT), and the City of Philadelphia (the City) at a public meeting and open house about the new Penn’s Landing. The event kicks off a multi-year community engagement effort led by faculty members and other researchers at PennPraxis, the consulting arm of the Weitzman School.
In the past decade, Philadelphia’s building boom has been accompanied by a string of demolitions touching almost every corner of the city, and resulting in the loss of everything from iconic churches to vernacular rowhomes.
On the morning of September 28th, an eclectic group assembled at the Ace Hotel in New York City.
As students and recent alums are confronted by uncertainties in the job market due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Weitzman School has expanded its professional development and career services initiatives, while taking them online. “It is critical, to me, that people stay engaged. There is so much that needs to be done, and this brain trust cannot be lost,” says Lucinda Sanders, the CEO of OLIN and an adjunct professor of landscape architecture.
Photo Randall Mason
PennPraxis, the consulting and community engagement arm of the Weitzman School, and the Weitzman School’s Graduate Program in Historic Preservation are working with Tuskegee University to build its preservation teaching capacity, produce original research, and conduct public outreach.
In November the Creative Footprint Project (CFP) convened in Tokyo to present it year-long community-sourced inventory of the city’s nightlife arts space and to discuss the future of creative space in the city. The project was supported by PennPraxis. Michael Fichman, researcher at PennPraxis, describes their findings.
Photo courtesy of Newfields.
The Miller House and Garden is considered one of the finest examples of Modernist domestic design—a midcentury masterpiece in Columbus, Indiana, brought to life by a trio of renowned designers at the top of their fields. A PennPraxis team will help to chart the future course of that work.
PennPraxis is the non-profit arm of University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design that supports thought leadership and design action to advance inclusion, innovation and impact in places that don’t usually get the benefit of design—more than 95% of the wor
In the spring and summer of 2018, PennPraxis worked with a group of community liaisons and residents of twenty-one neighborhoods across the city to create the Neighborhood Preservation Toolkit