The Art of Science: A new center for the study of nanotechnology merges landscape with building, and sculpture with architecture, reshaping a formerly bleak part of the University of Pennsylvania campus.
Although located in dense West Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania has a genuine campus—one organized around a series of green spaces and landscaped quadrangles carved out of the surrounding urban fabric. But the spot for the school's just-completed Krishna P. Singh Center for Nanotechnology is another story. The site, at the university's northeastern fringe, sits next to a six-story concrete and glass tower for materials research separated from its context by an off-putting brick plinth. And until construction of the new 78,000-square-foot Singh, its 1.7-acres had been home to a surface parking lot and Edison Laboratory—a one-story, nearly windowless box containing high-powered microscopes and other scientific instruments. “It was a part of campus where engineering was central but landscape was not,” says Marion Weiss, founder, with Michael Manfredi, of the New York City–based architecture practice Weiss/Manfredi.
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