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Louisa Shepard
News Officer
lshepard@upenn.edu
The Thermal Architecture Lab at the Weitzman School is part of a collaboration to develop energy and water autonomous systems for off-grid floating structures that are designed to adapt to rising waters.
Preserving Black history in Philadelphia is an evolving dynamic of the city’s legacy.
In a year marked by COVID-19, renewed calls for racial justice, a contentious presidential election, and an active wildfire and hurricane season, Penn experts share what’s needed to make urban areas more resilient to future crises.
The Center for Environmental Building and Design (CEBD) at The Weitzman School partnered with Mongolian nonprofit GerHub to test out ways of making ger living more energy efficient to reduce air pollution and improve respiratory conditions in Ulaanbaatar.
The world-renowned archaeologist has joint appointments in the Department of Anthropology, the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation and the Department of City and Regional Planning, and the Penn Museum as a curator in both the Asian and Near East sections.
Vincent Reina and Amy Castro Baker are working with the U.S. cities, including Philadelphia, through the Housing Initiative at Penn to design a housing assistance plan both during the pandemic and after.
The Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites will be led by Faculty Director Randall Mason, an associate professor in the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation, alongside renowned preservationist Brent Leggs, who is named senior adviser and adjunct associate professor.
Christopher Marcinkoski of the Weitzman School of Design unpacks—through the lens of speculative urbanization—the self-described ‘futuristic’ city to be built in Senegal, led by musician and philanthropist Akon.
For Climate Week 2020, The Weitzman School speaks with Braham about Penn’s Climate and Sustainability Action Plan, and what he’s learned about the build environment and its carbon footprint over time.
PennPraxis is continuing its partnership with the National Park Service on a cultural inventory and landscape project at the Lincoln Memorial, its most high-profile project to date.
Louisa Shepard
News Officer
lshepard@upenn.edu
Gilles Duranton of the Wharton School said the commercial construction industry can best adapt to a changing world by creating buildings with modular elements that can be easily disassembled or demolished. “Sometimes the right thing will involve tearing things down and rebuilding from scratch,” he said.
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The Stuart Weitzman School of Design was mentioned for its historically grounded, intersectional, and interdisciplinary approach to teaching design and architecture. “You need to know history to be avant-garde,” said Winka Dubbeldam.
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Planning studios within the Stuart Weitzman School of Design developed a plan for a new North Atlantic Rail, a high-speed speed train connecting New York and Boston. “There are 36 tunnels of this length or longer that have been built or are under construction around the world in the last 10 years alone—over 100 in the last 20 years,” said planner and Professor Emeritus Robert Yaro. “This is what the world is doing.”
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Stuart Weitzman School of Design grad students Seunglee David Park and Emily Kennedy wrote an op-ed about how Philadelphia can implement a universal transportation equity measure to identify vulnerable communities and establish a coordinated citywide process for factoring equity into city transit projects.
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Paul Farber of the Stuart Weitzman School of Design spoke about how inequity factors into a lack of memorials to those lost to pandemics. “We know if you have more time, money, and power, you have more access to build longstanding monuments and memorials. Those most impacted by pandemics are predominantly those who don’t have the resources to escape the city or to get the best care,” he said.
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David Eisenhower of the Annenberg School for Communication spoke about a new memorial to his grandfather, President Dwight D. Eisenhower. “I think memorialization is a process that is renewed,” he said. “So, when you dedicate the memorial, I think that you are investing or gambling, in a sense, on the future, that the message that a memorial conveys will have a kind of timeless quality to it.”
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