Three contoured concrete slabs stand outside of Meyerson Hall, one of the buildings encompassing the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, near the food trucks in a paved area a few steps from the intersection of 34th and Walnut streets.
“A lot of curiosity surrounds them,” says architect Richard Garber, on Penn’s faculty for nearly 10 years. “They are right on that busy corner at the north entrance to Meyerson Hall.”
The panels are the result of a unique seminar created for the Master of Architecture program by Garber, founding partner of GRO Architects in New York City. He pitched the seminar, Matter Making and Testing: Designing with Next Generation Precast Concrete, for the fall semester of 2019 as a “tech-elective seminar” that met degree requirements. Students learn about concrete, create original designs, and work with a local precast-concrete plant to fabricate their panels.
Six years in, the seminar is consistently oversubscribed, at 20 to 22 students. “We’ve found a desire in our students to not just document but make things,” Garber says. “The students are excited about the prospects of learning about, documenting, and ultimately building with precast concrete.”
The three panels now on campus are favorites of Garber’s, representing the 30-some that have been created over six years. “Design encompasses everything from art objects to things that have some level of utility, and these panels are both,” he says.
“I’ve shown them to artist friends who call them works of art. The precasters see them as material things, as panels that are useful in the world,” he says. “I think as architects we span that range; we discuss panel aesthetics, but increasingly we’re becoming interested in how they perform. I don't think it’s an either/or I think it’s both.”
Garber is working with Dorit Aviv, assistant professor of architecture and director of the Thermal Architecture Lab, to measure the panels’ performance. “Creating a full-scale mockup allows us to test the performance of the panel in real climatic conditions,” Aviv says.
The course grew from a connection Garber has with a concrete company, Northeast Precast in Millville, New Jersey, about an hour’s drive from campus.
The course includes case studies and Garber’s lectures, he says, about the history of concrete, how architects have used the material from antiquity through today and contemporary ideas about the material’s use.
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