A design fall studio brings interdisciplinary thinking to Philly’s historic and commercial core
Studio Plus design students at Weitzman focused on working through the future of Philadelphia’s Market East neighborhood, and explored issues of historic preservation, urban planning, and housing.
2 min. read
In 2024, Philadelphia community members successfully fended off plans for a mixed-use development in the Center City corridor known as Market East anchored to a sports arena, and while the city hasn’t put forward an alternative plan, Mayor Cherelle Parker recently announced a new planning initiative for the area.
Philadelphia’s Market Street east of City Hall in 1889.
(Image: John Gibb, Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Print and Picture Collection)
Stuart Weitzman School of Design students and faculty have been thinking through the future of the neighborhood and also how to think it through. Studio Plus was devoted to Market East and explored issues of historic preservation, urban planning, and housing. Students went into the field to research the area and meet in each other’s classrooms to analyze what they’ve found.
“Every city has got its own Market East, a historic core that is its commercial core,” says Randall F. Mason, professor and chair of historic preservation with appointments in city and regional planning and landscape architecture, whose second-year historic preservation studio forms one pillar of Studio Plus. “It’s a wonderful collection of buildings from different periods that represent the continuities of the grid of streets and its traffic and density of people. It’s transformed continually, but the city has been derelict in performing its duties of shaping change and balancing the private and public benefits.” Today, that balance feels particularly off-kilter. “The solution is a strategy of creating coalitions for change,” he says. “And preservation is always part of that mix.”
First, Mason’s students researched what has and hasn’t been preserved on site. “We created a memory map to see which buildings remain and which have been lost through time,” says Fatima Nayibi Cacerers Arar. Then, explains Shen-Tzu Chen, “we interview interested parties, including community organizations and developers.” They examine these histories in various ways, identifying the site’s significance, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. “We take the analyses and all the research we do on the ground,” Chen says, “and start to think about a preservation philosophy to apply to our individual projects.”
“I’ve used Market East as a site for studio classes throughout my teaching,” says Brian Phillips, a lecturer in the Department of Architecture. “Specifically, I’ve been interested in The Gallery mall, which was reimagined as the Fashion District in 2019 and then was slated to be partially demolished for the arena. It’s a contested space, which people deem as a kind of failure. But it wasn’t. It just wasn’t meeting the criteria of highest and best use of what a successful place is, which crosses social, economic, and political boundaries.”
This story is by Jesse Doris. Read more at Weitzman News.
Materials in the Annenberg School for Communication Library Archives include thousands of TV scripts, the first issue of TV Guide, and interviews about the early days of HBO—which help to chronicle TV’s 100-year story.
Centering joy in AI development and implementation
PIK Professor Desmond Upton Patton—of Annenberg and SP2—and collaborators introduce a joy-informed framework designed to initiate conversations among engineers, designers, and researchers.
Winter Storm Fern brought icy and snowy conditions to the Northeast and other parts of the country over the weekend. Penn Today asks physicist Robert Carpick about the unique properties of ice, the science of curling, and how close we are to ‘nonslip’ ice.
Organizations like Penn’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships foster collaborations between Penn and public schools in the West Philadelphia community.
Penn receives national distinction for community engagement
The recognition by the American Council on Education and Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching acknowledges Penn’s long-standing commitment to community-engaged scholarship and partnerships in West Philadelphia and beyond.
