Graduates of the Stuart Weitzman School of Design enter professions that are primarily focused on space, from small sites and buildings to sprawling landscapes and cities. But during the commencement ceremony for the Class of 2023, Dean and Paley Professor Frederick Steiner chose to focus his comments on time. Time can be a tool or an obstacle in the process of design, Steiner said, but it’s always “an invisible, silent collaborator.”
“Whether you’re building a building or creating an art installation, you’re working with everything and everyone that has shaped the place before you got there,” he said.
The Weitzman School held its annual commencement ceremony in Irvine Auditorium on May 13, 2023. Most of the 360 graduates began their studies in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and are leaving Penn to enter a profession, and a society, that has been transformed by it. Patterns of development, growth, mobility, connectivity, work, and leisure—central concerns for the design professions—have been dramatically altered in a few short years.
The Class of 2023 is “graduating at a moment of cultural polarization, trauma and fear but also hope and reflection,” said Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic for The New York Times, who delivered a keynote address. Kimmelman, who grew up in Greenwich Village at a time when the neighborhood was a “filthy, rundown, laid-back, 24/7, insufferably smug enclave for a diversity of working- and middle-class New Yorkers,” spoke about progress. In the beginning of the 21st century, a group of New Yorkers of all professional and personal backgrounds came together to form the High Line, an elevated park built on a former railway and designed partly by James Corner (MLA'86), professor emeritus and former chair of landscape architecture at Weitzman. The project was a “world-shaking 21st-century architectural game-changer,” Kimmelman said, illustrating the power of community organizing, planning, and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
But progress doesn’t follow straight lines or adhere to strict ideologies, said Kimmelman, who has meandered in his professional career between art, history, music, and architecture. Instead, it requires a willingness to regularly reassess conditions. The High Line is not only a landmark design achievement, but a “global poster child for runaway gentrification,” Kimmelman said. Designers need not only to envision and construct new buildings and places, but to engage “a wide public” in the debate about what those places are and how they should be valued.
“The public realm—whether we mean shared physical public spaces we design and build, or the pages of a newspaper or website we write and share—is where we get to thrash out our democracy and collective identity, where we negotiate who and what we are as a society and a polis,” Kimmelman said.
And as designers, Kimmelman told the graduates, “You will need to come to terms with the limits of your own agency.”
Rhea Nayar (MArch’23), a graduate teaching assistant and Master of Architecture graduate, was selected by her fellow students to give a keynote address at the commencement ceremony as well. Nayar, who grew up in Hong Kong, said the occasion was a “full-circle” moment for her: The 10-year anniversary of the commencement speech she gave at her high school. The graduates of the Class of 2023 are uniquely experienced at adapting to uncertainty, having endured several eras of virtual and in-person learning and collaboration just during the short time period of their graduate careers, she said.
“We have become experts at creating spaces that operate as adaptable, transient systems that ebb and flow with the fluid nature of how we live,” Nayar said. “Today, as we graduate, we carry with us the tools and knowledge to shape communities and built environments geared toward a more resilient future.”
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