Plan Philly: Engaging in Urban Dialogue

Philadelphia is such a relentlessly right-angled city, a place so completely devoted to its colonial grid, that it's not surprising that some architectural dissidents would insist on flaunting their curves. The PSFS tower, now the Loews Hotel, is the city's best-known nonconformist, but plenty of modest rowhouses also break out of the box with similar hip-jutting moves.

Bit by bit, the University of Pennsylvania is emerging from its redbrick rut. For years, Penn seemed incapable of putting up a new building that didn't include heaping quantities of those little red rectangles, along with gooey allusions to Philadelphia's Colonial past. The effect was to make the Ivy League campus feel like a place stuck in time, rather than one engaged in vital intellectual pursuits.

What influences the public's perception of Market East more: The mobs of rampaging teens who have descended on the Gallery mall over the last few weeks? Or the building's gloomy fortress walls, which have weighed down Philadelphia's traditional shopping street for well over three decades?

In the hope of ending its reputation for Fortress America-style embassies, the State Department yesterday selected a Philadelphia architecture firm known for its thoughtful and environmentally rigorous work to design a new, more welcoming U.S. Embassy in London.

When the Delaware River Waterfront Corp. selected Field Operations last fall to design a new park at the Race Street pier, it was hard to shake off a certain feeling of trepidation.

Philadelphia officials are usually generous architecture critics. There's nothing that they seem to enjoy more than crowing about their latest building project. Yet, even the city's most gregarious boosters are having trouble mustering nice words for the new Family Court building, planned for 15th and Arch Streets.

Young-Hwan Choi arrived in Philadelphia from his native South Korea in August. By October, the University of Pennsylvania architecture student had devised an elegant new design for the sidewalk sheds that protect pedestrians during construction. And he was barely into his second semester when New York announced it was adopting his innovative system as its official prototype.

During the last decade, America's supermarket chains made a startling discovery: City residents have to eat, too. The chains went into expansion mode, erecting spacious, modern stores in Philadelphia neighborhoods that hadn't seen a fresh apple in decades.

Let's cut to the chase on the architectural merits of 10 Rittenhouse, the poshly proper apartment house that has lately assumed its place on Rittenhouse Square's northeast corner, as if the location were its birthright:

The television series Sex and the City debuted in 1998, the same year I began writing about architecture and cities for The Inquirer. Little did I guess back then that Carrie Bradshaw's glamorous gallivanting through the streets of Gotham signaled a major image update for America's cities, from lawless jungles to middle-class playgrounds. It's the city that's sexy now.

Inga Saffron believes there is architecture and there are places, and you can’t write about one without writing about the other. Since becoming the Inquirer’s architecture critic in 1999, she has been just as likely to turn her eye toward Philadelphia’s waterfronts and sidewalks as to the latest glittering skyscraper. She is drawn to projects of all sizes and shapes, but especially those that form the backdrop of our daily lives.

Inga Saffron came to architecture criticism after five years as a foreign correspondent in Russia and Yugoslavia, where she covered two wars and was a witness to the destruction of two great cities, Sarajevo and Grozny. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2004, 2008 and 2009.

Read previous entries on her Skyline Online blog.

In the Art Museum's new Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building, Philadelphia has at last acquired a modern civic building that is a true Philadelphian.

Given the proximity of the state prison across from Harrah's new Route 291 racino in Chester, the inmates probably enjoy the best views of the hall's dazzling neon marquee, with its oversized simulated slot machine. And given the cheerless design of Harrah's gaming floor, the state inmates are probably no less confined than the slots slaves tethered to their electronic consoles.

You can give Philadelphia's traffic engineers this much credit: Their design for a rebuilt South Street Bridge is a big improvement over its scary, interstate-strength Walnut Street cousin. But then, wooden huts were an advance over cave living.

In the marbled corridors of Philadelphia's government, he is often invoked by nickname, sotto voce, with a touch of grievance: Lord Auspitz. In the sunny hearing room, however, it's always Mr. Chairman.

Philadelphia's new Delaware waterfront manager isn't supposed to choose a master planner until its Monday meeting, but in characteristic fashion, the politicians are laying the dynamite to sabotage the effort.

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In this winter of our discontent, when Philadelphia's City Hall is too broke to fund parades, keep libraries open on weekends, or even scoop up curbside piles of raked leaves, you can't help longing for a little brightness during the holiday season. Just don't count on finding that old seasonal twinkle in Rittenhouse Square.

There comes a point in the life of our workhorse industrial buildings when we stop seeing them for the marvels they perform, and soon after that, we stop seeing them altogether. In Philadelphia, which abounds with the unused relics of a mighty industrial past, it's all too easy to forget that these are the structures that made the city modern.