Concrete panels as teaching tools, materials testing, and outdoor sculptures
On view outside the Weitzman School of Design are three freestanding concrete slabs designed and made by students in a unique graduate seminar.
5 min. read
Concrete panels on view outside the Stuart Weitzman School of Design at 34th and Walnut streets are the products of a unique graduate architecture course that involves students in fabrication.
Three contoured concrete slabs stand outside of Meyerson Hall, one of the buildings encompassing the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, near the food trucks in a paved area a few steps from the intersection of 34th and Walnut streets.
“A lot of curiosity surrounds them,” says architect Richard Garber, on Penn’s faculty for nearly 10 years. “They are right on that busy corner at the north entrance to Meyerson Hall.”
The panels are the result of a unique seminar created for the Master of Architecture program by Garber, founding partner of GRO Architects in New York City. He pitched the seminar, Matter Making and Testing: Designing with Next Generation Precast Concrete, for the fall semester of 2019 as a “tech-elective seminar” that met degree requirements. Students learn about concrete, create original designs, and work with a local precast-concrete plant to fabricate their panels.
Six years in, the seminar is consistently oversubscribed, at 20 to 22 students. “We’ve found a desire in our students to not just document but make things,” Garber says. “The students are excited about the prospects of learning about, documenting, and ultimately building with precast concrete.”
Architect Richard Garber created and teaches the graduate course Matter Making and Testing: Designing with Next Generation Precast Concrete.
The three panels now on campus are favorites of Garber’s, representing the 30-some that have been created over six years. “Design encompasses everything from art objects to things that have some level of utility, and these panels are both,” he says.
“I’ve shown them to artist friends who call them works of art. The precasters see them as material things, as panels that are useful in the world,” he says. “I think as architects we span that range; we discuss panel aesthetics, but increasingly we’re becoming interested in how they perform. I don't think it’s an either/or I think it’s both.”
Garber is working with Dorit Aviv, assistant professor of architecture and director of the Thermal Architecture Lab, to measure the panels’ performance. “Creating a full-scale mockup allows us to test the performance of the panel in real climatic conditions,” Aviv says.
Casting concrete
The course grew from a connection Garber has with a concrete company, Northeast Precast in Millville, New Jersey, about an hour’s drive from campus.
The course includes case studies and Garber’s lectures, he says, about the history of concrete, how architects have used the material from antiquity through today and contemporary ideas about the material’s use.
The class visits the plant on a Saturday in September, getting a tour, learning about the material, then participating in a workshop. “Concrete has four basic components: water, sand, stone, and a binding agent, usually cement,” Garber says. “Students take these four components, combining them to cast concrete.”
Most of the student are in their third and final year of the architecture master’s program. They work in teams of four to create designs for the panels. The course also admits students from Weitzman’s Master of Science in Design: Robotics and Autonomous Systems degree program, merging those students’ expertise in coding and fabrication with the technical expertise of the precast plant.
“Students learn how to make technical drawings to convey their design intentions,” Garber says, working with 3D software and other design tools. “We encourage formal geometric exploration and risk-taking. We then work closely with plant employees to figure out how to make these student proposals.”
For several weeks in October students develop and send plans to the fabricator, who shares comments. Final adjustments are made, with some prefabrication in campus facilities. The plant then finalizes the precast formwork.
In early November the class goes to the factory and participates in the casting of the panels. “The students are literally getting their hands dirty. They’re really learning to work with material,” Garber says.
“When concrete is poured, it’s viscous. It’s poured as a liquid and then it hardens into whatever shape the student team imagines,” he says. “And that’s one of the most interesting things about the material: if you could dream it and figure out how to make the form work, you can make that shape.”
The students don’t know how the panels turn out until the first week of December when the class returns to the plant. Each group gives a presentation, with remarks from the project managers they work with. The panels are revealed in photos, and they all go out to the yard where the students meet their panels. “It’s totally fun,” Garber says.
Working with industry partners and receiving hands-on experience in the making of full-scale building elements is a meaningful learning process for architecture students, Aviv says. “This course allows them to experiment with the material, and with fabrication methods in a way that is unique and rare,” she says. “By being directly involved in the process of making full-scale panels, they gain new agency to rethink and innovate on the current methodologies.
Evolving approaches
Photos posted on social media from the first year prompted lots of calls, Garber says. One was from the Precast Concrete Institute, which has a foundation. Garber applied for a grant and received an award in 2022 of about $330,000, including in-kind gifts, over four years.
The class produces five or six panels each year, each weighing about 4,000 pounds. Panel sizes have increased from 4-by-8 feet to 6-by-10 feet. The 30 or so panels now line the long access driveway to the concrete plant.
At first the student designs were “really pushing geometry, trying to make some of the strangest shapes,” Garber says. But as the program has become more established “we’ve been able to give the students more distinct problems to address.”
The three concrete panels outside the School of Design are products of courses from different years, each the result of a specific architectural design challenge.
One year, students had to take on the design of a corner, traditionally in architectural design one of the biggest challenges, he says. Then they created reusable forms for panels with an eye to sustainability, so they had to fabricate two interlocking panels from the same form. Another year they worked with “ultra-high-performance concrete” and had to keep the panels to a maximum two inches thick, rather than the usual 10 to 12 inches.
The last two years they have been working on “insulated sandwich panels,” which locate “expanded polystyrene” between two thinner concrete panels, an application that is used on the exterior of a variety of building types, he says.
“In addition to panels being formally and geometrically beautiful, we now have a catalog of panels we can actually test to understand how they perform,” Garber says, referring to the collaboration with the Thermal Architecture Lab.
The three panels now outside the Design building are examples from three different years. From the first year is a “an optimized take on an inverted T, which is a typical concrete shape,” Garber says. The panel from 2021 was the proof-of-concept of reuse, one of a two-panel assembly; it also has an ultra-smooth surface. The third and largest is from 2023, with insulation sandwiched between concrete, also explores with joints and openings with movable parts.
“I do have favorites,” Garber says. The ones that are outside Meyerson Hall, home of the Weitzman School of Design “have been particularly important to me because I think that they represent really critical moments in the evolution of the course.”
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