Love seeing our work in Architectural Record Magazine! Well done team!
“It’s a terra-cotta precinct,” says architect Josh Aisenberg. For sheer concision, the two-word description of the rough, ruddy campus architecture of the University of Pennsylvania seems right on the money—and it should be, given the source. Aisenberg, a senior associate at Boston-based Annum Architects (Formerly Ann Beha Architects), heard the phrase, by way of a third party, from no less an authority than Amy Gutmann, Penn’s longest-serving president and a supporter of Annum’s new project at Penn when it first got underway some six years ago. Now complete, Annum’s renovation and expansion of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (GSE) adds yet another paean to red earthenware to West Philadelphia. Connecting a pair of 1960s buildings at the southwest corner of Walnut and 37th Streets, the new volume provides additional classroom space, enhanced accessibility, and a degree of visual consistency to the school, which had formerly been spread out across multiple sites. Annum president and principal Philip Chen quotes another Penn administrator—the GSE’s own dean, Pam Grossman—when he says the objective was to create “one GSE,” forging a distinct architectural identity for a program that had long lacked it. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/g_y-qNJ3 Words by Ian Volner Photos © Chuck Choi