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Penn’s Sylvania: The Campus as Landscape, a new book from Penn Press by Weitzman faculty and alums, invites readers to see Penn’s campus—and campuses everywhere—in a new light. In his introduction, Dean and Paley Professor Fritz Steiner, the book’s co-editor, begins to situate Penn’s campus within a broader global and historical context. What emerges is a portrait of the campus as a green oasis within Philadelphia’s dynamic urban fabric, shaped over time by planners, designers, and the natural world itself.
On Thursday, September 10, at 6:30pm, Steiner welcomes his fellow authors for a free launch event at the Kleinman Energy Forum.
In Chapter 1, Witold Rybczynski steps back from Penn and Philadelphia to present a wide view of the evolution of the campus idea from the tower to the green. He examines the origins of the term ivory tower and universities more broadly. Rybczynski explores European concepts about universities and how those ideas evolved and changed in North America. He notes, for instance, that Americans founded many colleges and universities in the New World, mostly early on with religious affiliations unlike Penn. He describes the emergence for the American idea of “campus.” Rybczynski concludes by relating the campus movement back to Penn.
Next in the second chapter, Catherine Seavitt zeros in on a specific endemic tree, the pawpaw (Asimina triloba), a favorite of the native people of the Philadelphia region, the Lenape, who were called the Delaware by the English colonists. The shrublike tree produces the largest edible fruit native to North America. The Lenape people would harvest this important food source after it ripened in late August through early October. Seavitt seeks to revalue and elevate the pawpaw, advocating the fruit as an option for an edible campus food.
“The wondrous mix of trees on the Penn campus resulted from many years of planning, design, and stewardship, as well as the ongoing relationships with its social and environmental context.”
Trees help define the character of campuses. This is certainly the case at Penn, and no one knows our campus landscape better than Laurie Olin. In his Chapter 3 essay, Olin recounts the planting history of Penn. He places Penn within the evolution of higher education in the United States. Unlike other early American institutions, Penn was nonsectarian from its start. Reflecting the values of our founder, Benjamin Franklin, who believed that learning should not be restricted to religion or class, Penn began as a college dedicated to the practical arts and sciences. Franklin’s “College of Philadelphia” started medical instruction in 1765. That initiative led to the institution adopting the term university when it was reorganized and rechartered in 1779, thus becoming the first university in the United States.1 Olin highlights the individuals responsible for greening the campus, including Ellen Harrison, Paul Cret, Ian McHarg, and Peter Shepheard.
Through the artistic medium of photography, we then present a portfolio of Ignacio Bunster-Ossa’s black-and-white images of the Penn campus in Chapter 4. During the pandemic, Bunster-Ossa began roaming around his West Philadelphia Spruce Hill neighborhood taking pictures of trees. More and more, he was drawn to the university and its flora. Like many of us during the pandemic, Bunster-Ossa saw the healing power of the outdoors.
Following the portfolio, Susan Weiler of OLIN delves into a contribution she made to the Penn campus—the Woodland Walk diagonal through Hill Square with its “125 Years” of women at Penn project by the conceptual artist Jenny Holzer, whose works focus on the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces. In Chapter 5, Weiler focuses on the tuliptrees (Liriodendron tulipifera)—she calls them the “guardians” of the campus—which she employed for Holzer’s “125 Years.” Tuliptrees are common and grand but often overlooked.
The University of Pennsylvania is now officially an arboretum, a collection of plants that contribute to its educational purpose. Lara Roman, Theodore Eisenman, Robert Lundgren, and Chloe Cerwinka lay out the importance of stewardship and maintenance to sustain the quality of the campus with staff at Penn Facilities and Real Estate Services enacting a long-term vision through day-to-day management actions. In Chapter 6, Roman and her colleagues illustrate how ongoing tree care by a coordinated team is required to actively manage tree species selection, planting, pest and disease treatment, removal, and replacement.
The wondrous mix of trees on the Penn campus resulted from many years of planning, design, and stewardship, as well as the ongoing relationships with its social and environmental context. The campus is a dialectical landscape, as the artist Robert Smithson called Central Park. Smithson celebrated Frederick Law Olmsted as a “sylvan artist” who wanted to place “asymmetrical landscapes . . . in the middle of the urban flux.”1 Penn’s campus fits within the midst of Philadelphia’s ongoing transformations and has been assembled by many plantings over the years. The essays that follow maintain a persistent theme of celebrating urban trees and the significant ways they shape the context and character of the college campus. The history of the campus idea informs their natures and suggests paths for their futures.
1) Robert Smithson, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,” Artforum 11, no. 6 (February 1973): 62.
