An empty outdoor space is transformed into a social garden

In the heart of West Philadelphia, a major transformation has taken place, turning a neglected school space into a vibrant, functional spot designed to enhance student well-being and foster community: the Breathing Room at William L. Sayre High School.

This ambitious project, supported by Penn’s Office of Social Equity and Community (SEC) as part of their Projects for Progress (P4P) initiative, was announced in 2023 as a partnership between faculty, students, and staff in the Weitzman School of Design, Graduate School of Education, Perelman School of Medicine, Netter Center for Community Partnerships, and Sayre High School. The project was unveiled this spring, and is quickly becoming a cherished part of the school.

“The process of developing and getting this idea off the ground, creating this space, has been really, really long, but it’s also just gone so incredibly well,” says Joseph Brand of the Netter Center who works daily with the students at Sayre as the site director for the Netter Center’s long-standing university-assisted community school program.

“We’re just so very excited and happy to have this resource and these partnerships for our students because a project like this allows the kids to see tangible change in their community, and moreover, their active involvement in creating this space has really given them something they’re super proud of,” Brand adds.

The University’s P4P program was introduced in June of 2020 to support initiatives geared at addressing the world’s most intractable problems. Each year, winning teams receive up to $100,000 for projects that seek to improve the quality of life for Philadelphia communities.

“The Breathing Room is a culmination of the work of students, both at Penn and Sayre, teachers, local volunteers, school administrators, many Penn faculty and staff,” says Ellen Neises, associate professor of practice in landscape architecture in the Weitzman School and the Lori Kanter Tritsch Executive Director of PennPraxis.

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Neises says the team designed the space with the goal of reshaping how students experience their daily school environment. “Kids could just hang out, talk, enjoy the shade, see some birds, smell the flowers, and sit at these beautiful tables instead of inside a dark cafeteria,” says Neises, pointing at one of the long, elegant, sturdy wood and concrete  community tables Weitzman students designed and built. “The aim of the project was really about reducing high school students’ stress and improving the social experience at school by getting them outside, especially at lunchtime.”

Building the team

Neises, who with Akira Drake Rodriguez, assistant professor in Weitzman’s City and Regional Planning Department, helped shape the partnerships to create physical improvements first at West Philadelphia High School, and then at Sayre, explains that the effort at Sayre started because design students entered the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Campus RainWorks Challenge.

“During the process, they talked with a lot of Sayre students and the principal and teachers at Sayre about creating a garden that would absorb rainwater and make a garden space that served a real purpose,” Neises says.

“Even though they didn’t win the competition, the idea took root,” she adds, “and when the Weitzman students graduated, they reached out to PennPraxis and asked if we could continue the project. That’s when we helped bring this incredible team together and wrote proposals, one of which received a Projects for Progress award.”

Neises points out that PennPraxis coordinates the Weitzman School’s Studio+ initiative, an interdisciplinary, action-focused design and planning studio that creates opportunities for students and faculty to work on projects that reduce racial inequity, including the quality of public school environments and access to safe neighborhood spaces. Studio+ teams always include community leaders and youth who collaborate on the planning, design and build phases. In last year’s Studio+, Weitzman graduate students and local public school students worked together to design and build The Porch, a stage and garden for West Philadelphia High School, over 15 months. That initiative was supported by a 2022 Projects for Progress award, and built on the success of Design to Thrive, a PennPraxis program aimed at empowering Philadelphia and New York teens to reshape the city.

Dyan Castro, a project manager at PennPraxis who graduated with a dual master’s degree in architecture and landscape architecture in 2020, shaped and coordinated the collaboration at Sayre, overseeing the day-to-day operations and ensuring the project stayed on track.

“My role was to help facilitate the vision from the design and development side of things to the school-based execution,” Castro recalls. “A lot of what I did was help identify needs at the school and then bring resources here. It was all about making sure we had everything we needed to make this dream a reality.”

Abdallah Tabet, a lecturer in landscape architecture at the Weitzman School with experience in design and building, taught the design studio that supported the efforts of eight Master of Landscape Architecture students to design the Breathing Room with input from Sayre students and administrators.

Design studio students Mira Hart, Shuyan He, Sneha Kakkadan, Illa Labroo, Yuming Lu, Lucia Salwen, Alexis Tedori, and Mengjie Wang were interested in contributing something to West Philadelphia before they graduated, and learning how to build what they draw. Neises says PennPraxis hired Daniel Flinchbaugh, a 2022 Master of Landscape Architecture graduate, who now works with Penn’s Facilities & Real Estate Services, to teach the Weitzman School students woodworking skills and support their work in the shop.

In addition to Brand and Castro, the two other members of the Projects for Progress team are Amanda Peña, a 2023 graduate, who led the planning studio portion of Studio+ which was instrumental in engaging the youth in the project, as well as visioning for other improvements to the school; and Heather Klusaritz, the director of the Center for Public Health Initiatives, which will evaluate the impact of the Breathing Room on student wellness and sense of belonging.

Engaging with the students

Peña says she became involved toward the end of her first year in the Master of City Planning program, seeing it as a unique opportunity to tie in her backgrounds in teaching, youth programming, and community engagement.

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“What I did, and still do at some capacity, was really driven by my work focusing on youth mental health and development,” Peña says. “It was aimed at addressing and talking about the issues they face when they go home, giving the kids tools to be open, and trying to motivate them to keep coming back and work on making something they could be excited about.”

Peña cites how she listened closely to the student government and after-school programs to gather insights to implement changes that reflected the students’ needs. She designed a resource kit for future campus improvement projects and initiatives.

“We did a series of activities with the kids. We were really just trying to understand, ‘What is it like for you to like get to school? What do you do after school? What does going to school mean to you? What is it like to be here to be a student? What would have made this experience better?’”

Peña and Flinchbaugh found that the importance of creating effective “third spaces” for youth—areas where they can feel safe, empowered, and engaged—ranked chief among students’ concerns.

“One of my core beliefs is that green spaces are a human right, and another is you trust kids with power tools,” Flinchbaugh says. “I really like teaching young people that they have agency in their built environment so if you can work with them to build those third spaces for themselves and they claim ownership over those spaces that they built, that’s a really special and empowering activity to do.”

Tabet and Flinchbaugh supported the graduate students in designing, prototyping, building, and planting the Breathing Room space. This included planning the layout, selecting and moving material, and building raised beds, benches, and tables.

Tabet describes his role as pushing the Penn students to “make the switch from computer-aided design to hands-on construction.” Flinchbaugh says he learned alongside those students as they “tested their prototypes in three-dimensional space.”

“You’re constantly learning,” Flinchbaugh says. “Whether it’s just how to use a screwdriver or drill, whether it’s how to properly lift a heavy object, or something like the more detailed design work of trying to figure out how to attach a shade canopy to a table base, those kinds of things you figure out just by building.”

Together, Castro, Tabet, and Flinchbaugh managed the volunteer days where Penn graduate and undergraduate students and West Philadelphia community members, including a contractor who graduated from Sayre decades earlier, helped with the construction.

For the designs, Tabet and his students incorporated elements that promote both aesthetic appeal and practical functionality into the space. “When I first saw the space, it was just an underutilized courtyard. The architect had designed it to get light and air into the classrooms,” Tabet says.

“The goal was to create something that not only looks beautiful, but also serves as a safe and engaging environment for students,” Tabet says. He notes that the students took some time to warm up to the idea of having Tabet and his team of designers come in. “They didn’t really like us at first because they weren’t sure what we were up to.” However, after some time, after the team added a few colors, benches, and plants, the entire atmosphere of the space changed. “Students began to see it as their own, a place where they could gather, study, and relax,” he says.

“It was amazing to see the shift in perception,” Tabet adds. “It became a vibrant area where students want to spend time. They started suggesting more improvements and felt proud of what they had helped to create.”

What’s next for the space

Sayre English teacher and Penn Graduate School of Education graduate Kate Conroy shares her excitement about the project, highlighting the potential for these new spaces to build connections among students.

“I hope it will help kids build more connections between each other,” Conroy says. “Kids spend a lot of time on their phones not connecting to each other, not going outside. And so, I hope this gives kids a safe space to really go outside and connect with each other.”

Conroy says she is excited to see what the students will add next to the space.

Neises of PennPraxis echoes this sentiment: “I think it’ll be really fun to see what happens when the design trajectory starts moving away from what the grad students originally intended and when people start improving on those well-laid bones.”

Neises says their goal was to get the structure and key elements of the courtyard set by June 2024, the end of the Projects for Progress timeline. The larger ambition is that everyone in the school is continually adding to the space and transforming it.

Klusaritz, from Penn Medicine’s Center for Public Health Initiatives, will be leading the evaluation of the space, talking with Sayre students and teachers about the impact of the Breathing Room on wellness, stress, optimism about improving their school and neighborhood environment, and other factors. Dorit Aviv, assistant professor of architecture and environmental building design at Weitzman, and her students measured the heat island effect in the courtyard before and after the garden transformation. Both of these kinds of evaluation will advance the research and advocacy efforts of Rodriguez, who is working with education activists to increase the equity of school environments in Philadelphia.

“So hopefully, this is just the beginning,” says Brand of the Netter Center. “We want to write more grants and we want to engage more students and engage the community in this work.”

Brand is also hoping to see this space become a model for other schools, showing that it can be done and that students can be a part of that transformation.

“It’s about more than just building a garden; it’s about building a community,” he says. “Because students smiling, enjoying the space, seeing the fruits of their labor—I think that that’s really special.”