The Making of Weitzman Hall: Landscape Design
The final installment in a series of interviews with the design, preservation, and construction teams
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As the Weitzman School of Design prepared 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, preservation, 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; Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Christopher Marcinkoski, founding partner of PORT; and Sean McKay (MLA’17), associate principal at PORT. The former Morgan building’s history and adaptive reuse will be the subject of an exhibition in early 2026.
What will this project add to the Penn campus?
Christopher Marcinkoski: When people visit Penn’s campus for the first time, they see Woodland Walk and Locust Walk, these grand axes through the campus that are so recognizable and charismatic. But for me, I think Penn's campus is best characterized by these little nooks and crannies that you discover over time, by being on campus. These aren’t spaces that immediately jump out to you when you arrive, but when you stop by Van Pelt Library and you take the cut-through over to Charles Addams Fine Arts Hall, or you discover the little Shakespeare Garden by Duhring Wing, you find these pockets where people can sit quietly or have a bite or have a conversation. To me, those are the places that I always think about when I think about Penn's campus.
In talking to a lot of alums, these are what they remember the most about the campus—these small hidden places to escape to when you were between classes, or stressed out, or thinking about what's next in your career. The way that Weitzman Hall interfaces Smith Walk and the Towne Building provided a chance to add a new garden space on campus.
Fritz Steiner: In many ways, PORT’s participation in this project represents a continuation of landscape architecture faculty and alumni that have created the Penn campus. Probably the most dramatic change in the history of the design of the campus came in 1977, when Martin Meyerson, who was the president of Penn and had been a city planning faculty member, asked Sir Peter Shepheard, a knighted landscape architect, who was the dean of what was then the Graduate School of Fine Arts, to put together a faculty team to develop a landscape development plan for Penn. The team was made up of all of the young faculty in the Department of Landscape Architecture, including Narendra Juneja, who was a partner at Wallace McHarg Roberts & Todd (which is today's WRT), Bob Hanna and Laurie Olin, who formed a partnership that is today's OLIN, and then two married couples—Colin and Carol Franklin and Rolf and Leslie Sauer—who formed Andropogon.
This group transformed the campus, first manifesting with College Green [Blanche Levy Park], and that plan is more-or-less still used as a touchstone for the landscape of Penn’s campus. The firms that were involved have gone on to have vast portfolios of work on campus both here at Penn, nationally and internationally. PORT continues that tradition.
Christopher Marcinkoski: We've not had the occasion to work at Penn previously, and it's a place that I love quite a bit, having been here for about 15 years now. Over the years, Penn has evolved into one of the great urban campuses in the US. As a practitioner, but also as a faculty member, to be able to make a little bit of a contribution to enhancing that quality is something that was really exciting.
On top of that, we love working with KieranTimberlake and have worked on other projects with them as well (most of them planning projects). This is the first capital project we've worked on with them. It's just been a great experience.
Rendering of Weitzman Hall showing the McHarg Terrace adjacent to Smith Walk (Image courtesy PORT)
What were the opportunities that PORT saw in this project?
Sean McKay: The location of Weitzman Hall and how it opens onto Smith Walk was such a huge opportunity with this project. When people think of Smith Walk, they think of the procession for Commencement at the end of the year, but it is also where a lot of the buildings have their main entries. This project is an opportunity to welcome people going along Smith Walk into the new addition with the fantastic design that KieranTimberlake had for the gallery space opening up towards it, along with terraces and the landscape that bridges the gap between the building and the Walk.
Christopher Marcinkoski: The visibility of that space was a big piece of how we started to think about those terraces, but we also wanted to make it a place that was super welcoming. Often schools of design turn their back to the campus—they're often tough buildings. The back side of Meyerson Hall, from the corner of 34th and Walnut Streets, is not the most welcoming edifice. But it opens up in a very different way on the side with Weitzman Plaza facing Fisher Fine Arts Library.
We wanted to allow Weitzman Hall to meet the ground in a way that allowed passersby to see what was going on and be drawn into the activity of the School. The terraces will do that. You can imagine people between reviews hanging out there, or prior to class or having lunch. Making the space welcoming was the big thing that drove the way that we thought about those steps.
Weitzman Plaza showing the steps opposite Weitzman Hall (Photo © Sahar Coston-Hardy)
Fritz Steiner: Everyone involved in the planning of Weitzman Hall was taken by Weitzman Plaza and its steps at 34th Street. One thing that is really cool is that the folks who are building Weitzman Hall basically take all their breaks on the steps of Weitzman Plaza. I imagine them coming back with their families in the future to show what they built and say, "This is where we had lunch. And now look, people are having lunch on what we built."
The site is not large, but your design has several parts. Can you talk us through them?
Christopher Marcinkoski: The side that faces Smith Walk has terraces with the sloped lawn. There is planting that wraps that lawn and encases it, making it a place for people to hang out. The side that faces 34th Street is very different. You have the porch, and this beautiful London Planetree. We treated that side of the building very differently than how we treated the side facing Smith Walk. Then you have the side that is between Lerner and Weitzman, which is very challenging—super narrow and it doesn't get a lot of light. There's a wonderful fountain back there that we cleaned up and slightly reconfigured. The side between Towne and Weitzman was about dealing with the topography and the transition in terms of the first floor down to grade.
There are a lot of different landscape conditions within that very small site, which was a challenge, but it really was an opportunity to make each side of Weitzman Hall feel different and have its own character, while also feeling holistic.
Rendering of the redesigned space between Weitzman Hall and the Lerner Center (Image courtesy PORT)
Sean McKay: Part of this project was trying to conceive that space [to the east of the building] and think about how that space wanted to interface with Towne and the new building. We came up with a name for that space (the “Unnamed Walk”) because I think it's one of the only walks on campus that isn't named. It is a passage to various buildings, including Lerner, and also for the backside of the new Weitzman Hall. There's a significant amount of grade change between the first-floor elevation of the building to where you are on the walk. A lot of our strategy for that space is softening that face of the building with new planting, while embracing the linear nature of the walk as you're passing through.
The plantings encircling the entire building are heavy with understory flowering trees with a dense shrub layer at the base of the building. A lot of the species selections we made have strong spring flowering when we are nearing the end of the school year, coinciding with commencement celebrations. But there also will be strong fall color timed to when people are coming back onto campus. Those are the two seasons when the landscape around the building—especially along the Unnamed Walk–is really going to be at its most vibrant.
Christopher Marcinkoski: The flowers—the dogwoods and viburnum and the other shrub layer along that edge—in the spring, it’s going to be spectacular. The blaze of white and green along that edge will sit really nicely in contrast to the terracotta and the other parts of the facade.
We wanted to make sure that that the edges of Weitzman Hall are not just a wall presenting to the public face. It needs to be something that has layering to it, with visual animation in the planting in front of the fenestration for the gallery below. It was about blending the edges, if you will, of KieranTimberlake’s addition into the campus through terracing and landscape and making those things not a hard edge, but more of a gradient edge.
Fritz Steiner: My hope is the design is going to be so beautiful and compelling that Unnamed Walk will get a name!
Can you talk about the logistics of this project?
Christopher Marcinkoski: From the perspective of planting, late summer is about the worst time you can pick to start to plant things. For us, making sure that the installation of the canopy trees as well as the shrubs and the understory is done in a way that ensures that they succeed means it is going to be more of a transition as opposed to all at once. Timing is a big consideration for us on this project.
In a way that's what landscape is, right? There is the old adage that architecture looks best on the day that the building opens and then progressively deteriorates over time. Landscape is the exact opposite. It often looks the roughest the day that it opens and it gets better over time. We are thinking about what fall looks like and into the spring of 2026, how dramatically that landscape will change as it starts to take root and mature.
You’ve talked some about the plant selection. Could you say more about that, and the choice of materials?
Christopher Marcinkoski: Prior to the building going in, there were a couple of really great canopy trees on the site. We did our best to think about how we could try to save or relocate them, but it just wasn't something that we were able to do. [The wood has been stored and is available for use by Penn faculty and students who submit a proposal.] In particular, there was a magnolia that my faculty colleagues were quite fond of. There are lots of native plantings in the project, taking cues from what's gone on in recent projects around the campus, but that magnolia was an important memory for those who've known the campus since before Weitzman was built. The Philadelphia Zoning Code for landscape design requires replacing any canopy that we remove as part of a construction project. So one of the things that we did with the project was to find a place for a new magnolia that would eventually grow back and replace the one that was lost in the construction of the new building. Sourcing it, along with the other trees for the project—making sure we found ones that we felt were going to grow into something that is equally beloved a decade from now—that was one of the big pieces of the procurement process for us.
Sean McKay: Coordinating the hardscape aspects of the terraces and walks and stairs was a big piece of the project as well. In some ways, the site is going to look very simple and uniform when it's done: a field of pavers with caps on top of the terraces and then the stairs next to that. But each of those involve different fabrication processes. We spent a lot of time to get them all to be uniform in finish and found a manufacturer that was able to produce these for us. We spent a great deal of time working to figure out exactly what is the right color and what is the right texture, so all of those pieces appear uniform and seamless as a ground plane.
Sean, as an alum, what does it mean to be reshaping the environment that shaped you as a professional?
Sean McKay: It’s everyone's dream to have that opportunity. We [PORT] work on public space across the country, and our work creates impact for places that are extremely meaningful and sentimental for other people. But it's very rare that you get the opportunity to do that kind of work for a place you have such a personal connection to. To give back, in some way, was really a phenomenal opportunity.
