The pyramid, standing about 40 feet high, appears at first glance to be a work of art, a sculpture or building designed to evoke an aura of old Egypt. It can be a visually halting experience for hospital visitors who spot it through a window.
The pyramid has been around since the late 1980s, sitting atop the Devon MRI Building. Despite its outward appearance, it is a purely functional structure, containing ventilation and other equipment that is usually placed on a roof.
The pyramid in Miller Plaza stands behind the Quadrature #1 sculpture, designed by the late Robert Engman of Penn's fine arts department.
“We were faced with the prospect of creating a one-story building with an ugly roof on it to house this facility. But then we came up with the idea of building a pyramid over it,” architect Alan Fishman told The Philadelphia Inquirer at the time. In a separate article, architect Robert F. Brown of the Philadelphia firm Geddes, Brecher, Qualls, Cunningham said that the structure came about in part because “we were looking for a form that says, ‘Stop!’”
The pyramid was chosen for its symbolic impact by late radiology department chairman Stan Baum, who “wanted to put some recognizable stamp” on the building, recalled Mitchell Schnall, now senior vice president for data and technology at Penn Medicine. “The pyramid was adopted as the symbol of our MRI scientific and clinical programs which were among the best in the world,” he said.
HUP’s pyramid is covered in orange-red diamond-shaped aluminum panels, with holes on two sides for ventilation. Unlike a true pyramid, its point is off-center, “making it a more dynamic and confusing form than it would be if perfect,” Inquirer architecture critic Thomas Hine opined.
The pyramid sits beside a sculpture, “Quadrature #1,” made of 30 tons of wavy red-and-white steel, and is sometimes confused with or thought to be part of Quadrature #1. The sculpture was created by the late Robert Engman, co-chair of the department of fine arts and chair of the graduate department in sculpture at Penn who died in July 2018.
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