An Empty Outdoor Space is Transformed into a Social Garden

In the heart of West Philadelphia, a major transformation has taken place, turning a neglected school space into a vibrant, functional spot designed to enhance student well-being and foster community: the Breathing Room at William L. Sayre High School.

This ambitious project, supported by Penn’s Office of Social Equity and Community (SEC) as part of their Projects for Progress (P4P) initiative, was announced in 2023 as a partnership between faculty, students, and staff at the Weitzman School, Graduate School of Education, Perelman School of Medicine, Netter Center for Community Partnerships, and Sayre High School. The project was unveiled this spring, and is quickly becoming a cherished part of the school.

“The process of developing and getting this idea off the ground, creating this space, has been really, really long, but it’s also just gone so incredibly well,” says Joseph Brand of the Netter Center for Community Partnerships who works daily with the students at Sayre, as the site director for the Netter Center’s long-standing on-site afterschool program.

The University’s P4P program was introduced in June of 2020 to support initiatives geared at addressing the world’s most intractable problems. Each year, winning teams receive up to $100,000 for projects that seek to improve the quality of life for Philadelphia communities.

“The Breathing Room is a culmination of the work of students, both at Penn and Sayre, teachers, local volunteers, school administrators, many Penn faculty and staff,” says Ellen Neises, associate professor of practice in landscape architecture at Weitzman and the Lori Kanter Tritsch Executive Director of PennPraxis.

Neises says the team designed the space with the goal of reshaping how students experience their daily school environment. “Kids could just hang out, talk, enjoy the shade, see some birds, smell the flowers, and sit at these beautiful tables instead of inside a dark cafeteria,” says Neises, pointing at one of the long, elegant, sturdy wood and concrete  community tables Weitzman students designed and built. “The aim of the project was really about reducing high school students’ stress and improving the social experience at school by getting them outside, especially at lunchtime.”

Neises, who with Akira Drake Rodriguez, assistant professor at Weitzman’s City and Regional Planning Department, helped shape the partnerships to create physical improvements first at West Philadelphia High School, and then at Sayre, explains that the effort at Sayre started because design students entered the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Campus RainWorks Challenge.

“During the process, they talked with a lot of Sayre students and the principal and teachers at Sayre about creating a garden that would absorb rainwater and make a garden space that served a real purpose,” Neises says.

“Even though they didn’t win the competition, the idea took root,” she adds, “and when the Weitzman students graduated, they reached out to PennPraxis and asked if we could continue the project. That’s when we helped bring this incredible team together and wrote proposals, one of which received a Projects for Progress award.”

Neises points out that PennPraxis coordinates the Weitzman School’s Studio+ initiative, an interdisciplinary, action-focused design and planning studio that creates opportunities for students and faculty to work on projects that reduce racial inequity, including the quality of public school environments and access to safe neighborhood spaces. Studio+ teams always include community leaders and youth who collaborate on the planning, design and build phases. In last year’s Studio+, Weitzman graduate students and local public school students worked together to design and build The Porch, a stage and garden for West Philadelphia High School, over 15 months. That initiative was supported by a 2022 Projects for Progress award, and built on the success of Design to Thrive, a PennPraxis program aimed at empowering Philadelphia and New York teens to reshape the city.

Dyan Castro, a project manager at PennPraxis who graduated with a dual master’s degree in architecture and landscape architecture in 2020, shaped and coordinated the collaboration at Sayre, overseeing the day-to-day operations and ensuring the project stayed on track.

“My role was to help facilitate the vision from the design and development side of things to the school-based execution,” Castro recalls. “A lot of what I did was help identify needs at the school and then bring resources here. It was all about making sure we had everything we needed to make this dream a reality.”

Abdallah Tabet, a lecturer in landscape architecture at the Weitzman School with experience in design and building, taught the design studio that supported the efforts of eight Master of Landscape Architecture students to design the Breathing Room with input from Sayre students and administrators.

Design studio students Mira Hart, Shuyan He, Sneha Kakkadan, Illa Labroo, Yuming Lu, Lucia Salwen, Alexis Tedori, and Mengjie Wang were interested in contributing something to West Philadelphia before they graduated, and learning how to build what they draw. Neises says PennPraxis hired Daniel Flinchbaugh, a 2022 Master of Landscape Architecture graduate, who now works with Penn’s Facilities & Real Estate Services, to teach the Weitzman School students woodworking skills and support their work in the shop.

In addition to Brand and Castro, the two other members of the Projects for Progress team are Amanda Peña, a 2023 graduate, who led the planning studio portion of Studio+ which was instrumental in engaging the youth in the project, as well as visioning for other improvements to the school; and Heather Klusaritz, the director of the Center for Public Health Initiatives, which will evaluate the impact of the Breathing Room on student wellness and sense of belonging.

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