Architecture | Penn Today

Weitzman externships in retrospect: Harisa Martinos

The master of landscape architecture candidate spent her externship at a New York City firm, absorbing its culture and learning its design process.

2 min. read

In school and in practice, mass timber gains ground

Penn architects and students are designing with mass timber to highlight its expressive potential and sustainability for construction in cities around the world.

Two students working with biodegradable food waste specimens.

Turning peels into pavers: How Penn designers turn food scraps into biodegradable building materials

The Weitzman School’s Laia Mogas-Soldevila and Yasaman Amirzehni transform unavoidable food waste—like fruit peels and eggshells, which account for 14.8% of post-consumer restaurant food waste—into durable, biodegradable building materials in collaboration with Penn Dining.

4 min. read

More air conditioners crank up as heat wave wilts large part of US

Dorit Aviv of the Weitzman School of Design comments on the costs and benefits of air conditioning.

New York City rebuilds a waterfront park to hold back rising seas

Matthijs Bouw of the Weitzman School of Design worked on a community development and flood mitigation project on New York City’s waterfront for more than 10 years.

Fritz Steiner, Stuart Weitzman, and J. Larry Jameson cutting the ribbon to the new Weitzman Hall.

Weitzman Hall, renewed and expanded, celebrated at opening ceremony

The Penn community gathered to celebrate the opening of Weitzman Hall, the Weitzman School of Design’s first new building in nearly 60 years.

3 min. read

Concrete is a big contributor to climate change. Penn researchers say they can shrink its footprint

Researchers in the Weitzman School of Design are helping make concrete greener by 3D printing streamlined concrete forms and developing alternative concrete mixtures that absorb more carbon from the air. Masoud Akbarzadeh is quoted.

Ph.D. researcher Yefan Zhi wins the Hangai Prize

Yefan Zhi, a third-year Ph.D. student in architecture at the Weitzman School and a member of the Polyhedral Structures Laboratory has won the Hangai Prize at the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures Annual Symposium 2025 for co-authoring the paper “Surface-Toolpath Twins of Shell Components in 3D Concrete Printing for Optimized Buildability and Surface Quality”.

Before and after aerial views of Weitzman Hall under construction and completed.

The making of Weitzman Hall

As the Weitzman School of Design prepared to open its first new building in more than 50 years, members of the design, preservation, and construction teams were highlighted in a series of conversations about the making of Stuart Weitzman Hall.