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| Jefferson Accelerator Zone project on 10th Street. The old rowhouse and retail building was turned into a innovation hub by Jefferson Hospital and will provide a place where medical entrepreneurs can manage their start-ups. (Photo courtesy of Matt Wargo) |
Philadelphia's rowhouse streets, and even many of its
commercial ones, follow a certain predictable rhythm. Redbrick building follows
redbrick building. Windows and doors are usually flush with the facades.
Buildings may sport finer or worse details than others, but this is not a city
of statement architecture and icons. The nature of the grid makes it
challenging for a building to stand out.
But not impossible. Take a stroll along 10th Street
between Sansom and Walnut, and you'll encounter a small, but profound,
aberration, a wrinkle in the smooth urban canvas. What was once the most bland
of two-story brick buildings has been transformed into a delightful piece of
sculpture.
The unusual new facade designed by Cecil Baker + Partners
is not the sort of otherworldly spaceship that a Frank Gehry or a Zaha Hadid
might land on a wide-open site somewhere in Los Angeles or Paris. Baker's
sculpture is squeezed onto a narrow lot between two typical 19th-century
Philadelphia workhorse buildings. It literally has to thrust itself into the
public's field of view to get noticed.
Baker created the design by tearing off the original
brick facade, which had been mucked up with a bad application of faux stone,
and replacing it with a wall of glass. At the ground level, it's not much
different from one of the high-end storefronts you see on Walnut Street.
But as the glass climbs up the front wall, it begins to
fan out, forming an off-kilter crystal that busts through the building plane,
turning the rowhouse facade into a three-dimensional object. The protrusion
extends just three feet over the sidewalk - the legal limit - but you can't
miss it.
Maybe the most startling thing about this daring renovation
is that it was commissioned by Jefferson University Hospitals, the
institutional behemoth that dominates the Washington Square West neighborhood.
Long partial to dowdy, neo-traditional architecture, the hospital is on a
mission to rebrand itself as a cooler, more innovative organization.
After CEO Stephen K. Klasko took over last year, he
encouraged employees to think more entrepreneurially. To help, he made his
first building project an incubator for bio-med start-ups, with the zippy name
Jefferson Accelerator Zone, or JAZ. Given that much of the new hospital
architecture we're seeing in Philadelphia is gargantuan in scale and blandly
corporate, Klasko's desire to make his mark with a rowhouse-size building is
refreshing.
Jefferson already owned the building, which was occupied
by its videography department. For years, it was closed off from the city like
so many Jefferson buildings by hospital advertisements pasted over the windows.
Klasko told me in an interview that his administration is
now committed to transparency and innovation, and he wanted the Accelerator
design to convey those new values. You can't find a better communicator than
Baker's open, imaginative facade, a visual depiction of the shattering of
tradition.
Baker has been designing rowhouses (and much else) in
Philadelphia for 40 years. He has produced a lot of fine work, but like so many
architects here, he is seldom allowed by clients to stray outside the lines.
As a result of that cautious approach, Philadelphia
rarely produces architecture at the extremes, either ridiculous or innovative.
You almost never encounter anything that might be described as fun.
That wasn't always the case. Frank Furness designed
exuberant, highly colored compositions in the 19th century that still thrill.
And in the 1950s and 1960s, Philadelphia architects conducted ambitious
experiments with form and materials. Today, so much architecture here (and
elsewhere) looks as if it had been assembled from an Ikea flat pack of standard
parts.
Because of its unusual shape, the bulging diamond at the
top of the Accelerator had to be custom-built. Construction was not cheap. It
cost Jefferson $775,000 to retrofit the 1,825-square-foot building.
Once he was instructed to produce a design that expressed
the idea of innovation, Baker said, his mind immediately turned to Ben Franklin
and his famous kite experiment. You can see the kite motif in the planes of
glass pushing out of the facade. He softened the transition to the neighboring
building by inserting vertical wood slats over the recessed entrance.
The rest of the project was pretty straightforward. The
interior was gutted and outfitted with meeting rooms and a lounge, all visible
from the street. Ironically, the interiors seek to express the hospital's new
mantra of innovation with bright colors and reproductions of modernist
furniture - now the de facto look for corporate interiors. Still, it's a change
from the usual hospital neutrals.
You also don't want to look too closely at the
construction details, which are poorly finished in places. In fairness, Baker
was hired only in May, after Jefferson's building contractor had already
started work on the project.
Klasko said he sees the Accelerator as a quick and easy
way to heighten its visibility in the city. It's part of the same strategy that
led the hospital to purchase the naming rights to Market East station. With
shuttles now running between the station and hospital buildings, the emphasis
on transit is an incredible turnaround from a decade ago when the hospital
insisted, against strong public opposition, on building a grotesque, open-deck
garage on Chestnut Street to advertise its presence.
From the inside of the Accelerator, Jefferson employees
can easily see the hospital's two original buildings, as well as the activity
on 10th Street. If the Accelerator helps the hospital remember that it is part
of a complex, unpredictable city, that will be the biggest innovation of all.
Source: Philly.com
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