The Making of Weitzman Hall: Bricks
The fifth in a series of interviews with the design and construction teams
The south façade of Weitzman Hall under construction in September of 2025 (Photo Gordon Stillman)
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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 for a series of conversations about the making of Stuart Weitzman Hall. This conversation included Fritz Steiner, dean and Paley Professor at Weitzman; Kevin Burns, project executive, Target Building; and Adam Loughry, associate [architect], KieranTimberlake. The former Morgan building’s history and adaptive reuse will be the subject of an exhibition in early 2026.
Bricks are ubiquitous on the Penn campus and around Philadelphia. What accounts for that?
Fritz Steiner: I believe there’s a lot of brick in Philadelphia because of the physical structure of the city with the [Schuylkill and Delaware] rivers. The material is one that, like stone, is very common in Philadelphia. And so when people from Europe started to settle this area, bricks became a logical building material. Similarly, the early settlements before the Quakers were Dutch and Swedish. Brick is a very common building material in Scandinavia and the Netherlands for similar reasons. You’ve got a lot of river areas that are muddy and have a lot of clay.
Brick is ubiquitous on Penn's campus. (Photo of Weitzman Hall under construction in August of 2025 courtesy Target Building)
Adam Loughry: I’m not an architectural historian, but this is true all the way to today. It’s an incredibly durable material and it’s really versatile because you’re working at a scale of something you can manipulate with a hand versus a lot of modern materials that are panelized. With brick, you can create endless permutations. Going back to Medieval times, building exteriors needed to be quite durable to keep out the weather. They didn’t have all the fancy sealants and weather barriers that we have today. Also, brick is really good at carrying vertical load. You can put wood on the outside of a building as cladding, and we still see that today, but it requires a lot more maintenance and it’s not nearly as durable as brick or stone. And a wood clad building is going to be susceptible to fire. So, the buildings that have lasted for hundreds of years tend to be brick, like the row homes that many of us live in here in Philadelphia.
Brick absorbs water. It’s not a waterproof material but it keeps water out. When it’s formed and fired, there are micro-pores in the brick that allow moisture to enter the brick. When it freezes in winter and the water expands in those small pockets, it doesn’t degrade the structural quality or appearance of the brick.
To bring it back to campus, around the late 19th century and early 20th century you saw the really big push for collegiate Gothic architecture on campuses. It’s a material that feels appropriate for civic and institutional buildings. An early example of that on Penn’s campus is The Quadrangle, which was designed almost concurrently by the same architect as the Morgan Building, Cope and Stewardson, who then went on to design the Towne Building east of Morgan.
Where do the bricks used for the Weitzman Hall addition come from?
Kevin Burns: I’ll just say, brick is a very interesting material from a construction sequencing standpoint because there’s no exact way that you have to build a brick facade. It’s always a challenge and it’s a lot of fun for us as construction managers.
This was a Danish brick [made by Petersen Tegl]. We had a few different challenges because the brick needed to be fabricated within a certain window of time, then it had to ship across the Atlantic. You have to factor in the shipping—whether you get on the slow boat or the fast boat. And we were dealing with a pending dock builder strike. We ordered the brick far ahead of time to make sure that we got it in the United States through customs before any looming strikes. And luckily for us, this was before any kind of potential tariff issues.
Brick production at the Petersen Tegl factory, Denmark (Photo courtesy Petersen Tegl)
How was this particular brick chosen?
Fritz Steiner: Well, there is the existing 1892 Cope & Stewardson building that was called Morgan. It used a Pennsylvania brick, I believe, and there was replacement brick and terracotta, which was locally sourced. That brick is celebrated in the renovation—it’s visible and exposed in the interior and exterior walls of the building as a feature of KieranTimberlake’s design.
For the new building—the addition—there were three considerations. One is aesthetic, second is cost, and the third is sustainability. The Petersen Tegl brick was aesthetically very distinctive. The bricks were designed in cooperation with the Swiss architect, Peter Zumthor, and they’re handmade. So, they were very fitting for a building that is focused on design and fine arts. Also, the bricks fit well with the two existing buildings that were both designed by Cope & Stewardson [Morgan and the Music Building]. And they were very competitive as far as cost goes. And the final aspect is sustainability. Throughout the project, sustainability has been taken very seriously. The university requires at least LEED Silver certification for new buildings.
The company has made a really deep commitment to brick making in a sustainable way, and that’s clear in their clay extraction, their molding, their drying of bricks, their brick firing, and even the way they build their own facilities. Even with the need to ship them from Denmark, which obviously is not the ideal thing from a sustainability perspective, they won out on the sustainability factor. They were price competitive, more beautiful, and more sustainably produced than other options.
What’s been your impression of seeing the bricks go up as compared to looking at a mock-up or the samples?
Fritz Steiner: I’m in total awe of the craftspeople that are making them go up. They are just a joy to watch and they’re clearly practicing their art at a very high level. The attention to detail in terms of the molding and the spacing is just astounding and very impressive.
Adam Loughry: Seeing the brick go up is just thrilling. During the design process, we probably looked at over 200 different brick options for this project. We winnowed down that list and made sample panels that we reviewed with the group. I think we’re just incredibly lucky that we stumbled onto this brick during that search.
At the site, someone is laying each one of these bricks by hand. And each of those individual bricks has a thumbprint from the person at the fabricator who popped the brick out of the wooden mold that forms the shape and depth of the brick before it’s fired. In some ways, that is analog to how Morgan was built, and it feels there’s some continuity there.
Many of the surrounding buildings have more of a mixture of red and brown bricks and what they call clinker brick, which have a dark, fired edge that gives a very different coloration. It’s more of a collegiate gothic deployment of brick. This new addition bridges between those two worlds. If you look at the Danish brick, it has this rich variety of color, from reds to browns, with this iridescent kind of firing that comes from the clinker process and how the temperature is varied in the kiln. Also, every brick is shaped slightly differently because it’s exposed to different temperatures based on where it sits in the kiln. Some of them have a slight curvature, they’re not square and rectified, and they don’t appear manufactured. That variety, even though it is subtle, is noticeable when you get close.
The south facade of Weitzman Hall with Penn Engineering's Towne Building at right (Photo Gordon Stillman)
What was the biggest lesson have you learned about materials on this project in the course of design and construction?
Kevin Burns: It’s been intriguing how these particular materials marry together, with the relationships between the curtain wall and the brick and the metal panels. and how they all come together, the detailing and the overlap it takes to do that. It’s not necessarily the individuality of each material, but how they all morph and come together that has been a process and a learning experience at times.
Fritz Steiner: For me, it’s been learning about how a very ancient and very humble building material can evolve through time and be updated through thoughtful design and a careful consideration of how one actually makes a brick.
Adam Loughry: Absolutely. I don’t know what the total quantity of bricks is on this project, but it’s relatively small compared to other buildings on campus. It’s still thousands of bricks, and somebody has to touch every single one. And yet when we looked at the pricing, and we compared various different facade systems and materials, it was the most competitive. This fancy handmade brick from Denmark is still 40% less expensive than the glass and metal panel in the building. This project was the perfect opportunity to deploy a beautiful material that ultimately is far superior than where we would’ve been if we would’ve pursued an all-modern material building. We found the right material for the job, and it’s thrilling to see it go up.