The Making of Weitzman Hall: Architectural Renewal
The second in a series of interviews with the design, preservation, and construction teams
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As the Weitzman School of Design prepares to open its first new building in more than 50 years—an interdisciplinary hub for research and teaching in the historic heart of Penn’s campus—Weitzman News gathered members of the design and construction teams to talk about the making of Stuart Weitzman Hall. The conversation included Weitzman Dean and Paley Professor Fritz Steiner (MRP’77, MA’86, PhD’86); Dominique Hawkins (C’92, MArch’92, MSHP’92), managing principal at Preservation Design Partnership; Stephen Kieran (MArch’76), co-founding principal at KieranTimberlake. All three are Penn graduates. The former Morgan Building’s history and adaptive reuse will be the subject of an exhibition in early 2026.
The historic structure of Weitzman Hall is part of a historic precinct on Penn’s campus that was added to the National Register of Historic Places in the 1970s. What reviews was the renovation and addition subject to?
Dominique Hawkins: This project was subject to review by the Philadelphia Historical Commission and the State Historic Preservation Office. The building is designated as a historic resource locally. Local review provides jurisdiction over what is known as “the public way,” which is typically the streets, highways, walkways, etc. that are accessible to the public. Now, when Vagelos Labs was built [south of Weitzman Hall], Penn had to take down a historic building. There was an agreement with the state that the state would then get jurisdictional review over the Music Building and Morgan, and that those two [Cope & Stewardson] buildings had to stand. We sent the schematic design drawings to the State of Pennsylvania for review. We essentially said, “We’re saving the historic building and we’re restoring the exterior masonry, we’re replacing the windows, we’re replacing the roof, and there’s going to be this addition, and it is this big and it’s located over here.” As the design moved forward, the documentation was sent to the City of Philadelphia for a historical commission review.
Fritz Steiner: They made a number of suggestions we found helpful and followed. There was one that we didn’t agree with, and we had discussions about that aspect. It had to do with the color of the bricks. Dominique and Steve made such a compelling argument, they won the day.
Stephen Kieran: I think the default position on an addition to a historic building would use a similar brick to the original building, and in this particular instance, we didn’t feel that that was the right approach. There are really two contexts for the addition. One is the historic building [Morgan], but the other is the other historic building right across the way on Smith Walk, both by Cope & Stewardson, but the latter building, the Towne Building, has a brownish-purplish-blackish brick that was used extensively across the Penn campus from the late 1920s through the 1930s, and we felt that was a better reference. We were able to find a really wonderful handmade brick with a lot of character to it, a lot of quality, and that wasn’t replicative of the Cope & Stewardson’s brick, but was evocative of it.
Dominique Hawkins: One of the aspects of historic buildings is that there’s a degree of craft. You can really see it if you get up close and get on the scaffolding and look at the terracotta on Morgan. It’s just astonishingly beautiful. In the same way, there is craftsmanship in the new brick [used on the addition]. You can see the thumb prints where they pushed it out of the molds, and that is something that is really lost in new construction. It’s about production and not craft, in many instances.
Produced in Denmark by Petersen Tegl, the bricks used for the Weitzman Hall addition (at left) bear the traces of their manufacture by hand. At right is the neighboring Cope & Stewardson building that is now part of the Lerner Center.
Why was this building important to preserve?
Fritz Steiner: I think there are three reasons. One: Its beauty and craftsmanship. Two: Its contribution to sustainability. Three: Its contribution to heritage. It began as a girls’ orphanage, as was noted, for years was a physics building, and then nursing, and then for the last several decades has been the home of fine arts studios. So, it has contributed in many ways to the campus and also to the city since its origins in the 1890s.
Stephen Kieran: Those reasons are all huge for the architecture profession today. And for too long we’ve continued to premiate designs that are entirely new fabric over more complex and important opportunities to carry forward the past by adding to and renovating it. It’s a type of project that I think remains devalued across the design professions. It’s much simpler to design a singular, new building out of whole cloth than it is to add to and renovate an old one. So the act of preserving the past for the future by altering it, changing it, adding to it and enhancing its use is a critical message not only to all the students who come through the school, but also to the profession at large.
And the end result is a far more functional building than we would’ve gotten had an entirely new larger structure been put up. There’s a lot of diversity to the program. And there are things the old building does really well, things the new building does really well. Putting all the accessibility features into the historic building would’ve destroyed a lot of it. So, by being able to address all of that directly in the new building, we’ve been able to maximize the use of the Morgan Building.
Dominique Hawkins: Well, since you all have given the preservation answers for me, I’ll say more about design! I think there’s this incredible inspiration that comes from melding old and new. And we have to remember, Weitzman is a multidisciplinary school. We have architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, historic preservation. All of those values are being reinforced in what the school is putting forward here—its new face, in essence. We will have this presence on Smith Walk, the porch will be this glorious space, and it will also open us up to the larger university community.
We’re at a moment where cultural memory is under siege. What does it add to people’s daily experience to be in the presence of historic spaces and structures?
Stephen Kieran: It adds so much. Just take a walk around the city of Philadelphia any day and reflect on how different everything is, how diverse this city is. A large part of the diversity comes from the different times when things were built. There’s a richness to that, that anchors us all, I think. There are some college campuses that try to be all of a single time. They’re my least favorite. The ones that are of many times are my most favorite. The same goes for cities. The past isn’t past. It has to be brought into the present. And there’s not some otherness to it. It is us. Whether we acknowledge it or not, as a profession, we’re all always beginning based on the knowledge that’s been developed by everybody who came before it, before us, and sometimes reacting against it, but if you don’t have anything to react against, you can’t even do that.
Steel trusses were inserted into the studio space on the top floor of the historic building (construction photo Gordon Stillman)
Is there an aspect of the former Morgan building that was especially challenging or rewarding to work on?
Dominique Hawkins: Recently I went on-site just to see how things were going. I was looking at the terracotta as they were doing the repairs, the selective replacements. Terracotta gets pressed out like a brick, and the building has 37 different shapes. As a collection it’s beautiful, and then when you get your nose up to them, you realize that on some windows, the person who laid it originally did slightly different shades and alternating colors going down the window jamb. The pattern ends up melding together when you’re standing on the ground. But when you get your nose up to it, you can really see it. So there are these moments of joy.
Stephen Kieran: On the technical side, it’s a structural masonry perimeter wall building with a wood frame interior. A huge challenge was how to tie those masonry walls back to the structure. When you go into the building, you’ll see steel channels around the perimeter of the building lagged into the masonry walls that are a huge insertion in a historic building to allow it to continue to meet contemporary life safety and seismic codes.
What does a preservation project offer, in terms of sustainability?
Stephen Kieran: Quantifying carbon is the not-so-new frontier of sustainability, but 20 years ago, when we first started modeling, it was shocking to see. I remember the first building we modeled. It was a small four-room house, and the amount of carbon—thousands of pounds—that went into it was really surprising. We developed a tool to measure carbon while you’re designing, and one of the things we learned was the volume of carbon that goes into the building of a building can be decades worth of operating carbon (the carbon used to heat, cool, ventilate it, and power it).
This all bolsters the arguments for keeping as many buildings as possible and giving them new life, because you’re basically starting with a huge carbon bank—technically, a carbon sink. We have to start thinking about our buildings as our most expansive cultural carbon sink and use it rather than abuse it.
Colleges and universities across the country are grappling with the future of historic structures on their campus. What would you have them think about?
Fritz Steiner: Start by hiring KieranTimberlake and Preservation Design Partnership.
Stephen Kieran: Thank you! The Morgan Building is not unlike a lot of campus buildings that go more than 100 years without a major renewal, and we see that all over the US. We’re starting a building now at the University of Wisconsin that is almost 150 years old and has never been comprehensively renovated inside and out. Universities have vast collections of buildings and they need to think about them differently. They’re not real estate assets in the way a developer thinks about a building: They’re liabilities. They’re getting older and they’re needing work that is usually just not funded in operating budgets. They’re typically the most difficult buildings to raise money for because donors continue to want new buildings with their names on them. So, there’s financial planning and donor opportunities that universities need to consider.
Dominique Hawkins: From the moment we cut the ribbon and have the lovely opening party, a building starts to deteriorate. The building could be old, or it could be new. Over time, you get to a point where you make a choice between a major intervention or demolition and building a new building. We are a disposable society that is more likely to demolish something we do not value. Now, historic preservation provides a dimension of value to places—there is a value built into older buildings that we are willing to pay a price for. I will also say, old buildings have really good bones. But every building needs constant renewal or rehabilitation and attention. The problem is, as a society, we think it’s done and walk away, and we don’t regularly invest in the maintenance and upgrades necessary to prevent a huge infusion of cash.
I worked for another university on a master planning exercise and I was working with a campus planner. I was brought in to look at the historic part of the campus, and they were doing the larger campus. When I went to campus to take some photos, it happened to be their homecoming. I didn’t realize it, and the center of the historic campus was empty. The buildings were no longer occupied. But in the newer sections—forgettable buildings from the 1960s—it was buzzing with activity. When we got the job and met with the president, she said, “I went to school at Penn and I want the historic part of this campus to be an active part of everyone’s experience as they go through this university, because it’s important to have that continuum.” And she has systematically started repairing, restoring, rehabilitating and renewing every building in the historic center of that campus. As Fritz said, it’s the best address.
