Category: CITY 350 Urban Projects

Olivia Kaplan, BMC ’24 & Dylan Ioffreda, HC ’24

The Drawings of Architect Jonathan Lane

Semester: Spring 2023

Praxis Course: Praxis II – CITY 350 Urban Projects

Faculty Advisor: Jeff Cohen

Field Site: The Lane Family & University of Pennsylvania’s Architectural Archives

Field Supervisors: Barbara Miller Lane & Steven Lane

Praxis Poster:

Olvia Kaplan and Dylan_Praxis Poster_Final_Resized

 

Further Context:

Our Praxis project focused on the architectural drawings and career of Jonathan Lane (1931-2021). His work explored the evolving species of modernism and models of residential development in suburbs outside of Philadelphia from the late 1950’s through the 1970’s. By means of collecting drawings, cataloging, researching locations, and finding images, our goal was to organize and understand the scope of Jonathan Lane’s work.

At the start of the semester, we met with Jonathan’s wife, Barbara Miller Lane (founder of the Growth and Structure of Cities Department at Bryn Mawr College). In our discussion, we were able to learn more about his professional career; from Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio in Chicago to studying at M.I.T., to settling in the Philadelphia area, where he primarily practiced in a studio behind Lane house in Wayne.

In the backyard studio/office space, hundreds of drawings, some rolled and some stored flat in drawers, recorded the breadth of Jonathan Lane’s architectural work.  We worked to catalog the more than 50 rolled sets, mostly blueprints and hand drawings. These were incredible works showing the artistic and functional process of architecture. We were also able to work with Jonathan Lane’s son, Steven Lane, as he began working through the flat drawers, providing further information to the project.

Our goal was to identify the different projects represented, noting client, date, location, and number of drawings for each. We compiled the data on the projects into spreadsheets and began the process of connecting the drawings to Steven Lane’s drawings to create a master list in order to figure out the homes that still stand today.

As we became familiar with some of Jonathan Lane’s work, we started to notice features that he favored in house designs – there was repetition of expansive horizontal layouts spanning multilevel sites, dark vertical wood siding, long decks and corner windows, and ceiling planes uninterrupted by lighting fixtures. Taking note of this, we started to explore relationships of the work with coeval published designs. While similar in process, each project had personality and a distinct nature of comfort and familiarity that truly seems to define Lane’s practice.

As the work on the collection continues, we anticipate a transfer of the cataloged and collated drawings to the University of Pennsylvania Architectural Archives and the future integration of the cataloging into the Philadelphia Architects and Buildings website.

Being able to work closely with the architectural drawings and the family of the architect has been a unique and unforgettable experience, one that has thrown new light on our sense of architectural design. For both of us, we found personal favorites and interests as we dug deeper into Jonathan Lane’s drawings and career which will continue to guide our undergraduate studies and future endeavors. Having the opportunity to work with Barbara Miller Lane, Steven Lane, and be guided by Professor Cohen of the Cities department all to create a memory of Jonathan Lane’s life’s work was an unforgettable experience. It has piqued new interests and taught us lessons and histories we may have not been exposed to before. It was also a privilege to work alongside the Lane family and Bryn Mawr College with the hundreds of sheets of drawings, as well as aid the University of Pennsylvania’s Architectural Archives in the start of archiving the many works.

 

Madeline Cohen, BMC ’24

Architectural Drawings: Cataloguing Lower Merion Township’s Archive

Semester: Spring 2023

Praxis Course: Praxis II – CITY 350 Urban Projects

Faculty Advisor: Jeff Cohen

Field Site: Lower Merion Township

Field Supervisor: Greg Prichard

Praxis Poster:

Maddie Cohen_Praxis Poster_Final

 

Further Context:

Hi, my name is Madeline Cohen, and I am a junior Growth and Structure of Cities major at Bryn Mawr College. I am interested in pursuing a career in architecture. This semester I worked at Lower Merion Township in the Building and Planning Department cataloguing their architectural drawings archive. The archive is made up of thousands of drawings from the 1920’s until today, collected for the purpose of regulating building. Historic Preservation Planner Greg Prichard is working to catalogue all these projects and I had the opportunity to help him.

Cataloguing architectural drawings is important for the preservation of documents for future generations to use and learn from. Such architectural drawing sets preserve records of the form of building at their genesis- buildings that inevitably change and often disappear over time. Cataloguing them makes these records discoverable by researchers. Researchers can locate specific projects through attributes such as location, date, architect, client, and purpose.

These records are valuable to the township’s officials. They serve as evidence of the built fabric as it has evolved over decades. Architects, engineers, and landscape architects use the records for projects they are working on near a property or on a property. Researchers use the records for tracking the constantly evolving physical history of places within the Lower Merion Township.

The drawings I was cataloguing were between 1937 and 1938. The archive is organized on shelves by project number. The database I was working in was Excel. For each project within the Excel spreadsheet, I record the project number, title, address building type, number of sheets, sheet contents, seal date, drawing date, architect, and builder. The buildings catalogued in the spreadsheet so far are primarily residential but there are some academic, commercial, and public buildings included as well. The drawings within each project typically include plans, elevations, sections, and plot plans.

This semester while working at Lower Merion Township I have learned about the history of buildings and planning in the township and how to identify development patterns within specific time periods. In addition, I had more exposure and practice to reading architectural drawings which will help me with my career goals. I improved my database management and Excel skills. I also met a lot of great people and made friends while gaining experience working in an office setting.

Kelly Peterson, BMC ‘ 23 & Deniz Gonen, HC ’23

Public Programming at Philadelphia City Hall

Semester: Spring 2023

Praxis Course: Praxis II – CITY 350 Urban Projects

Faculty Advisor: Jeff Cohen

Field Site: Philadelphia Visitor Center Corporation, City Hall Branch

Field Supervisor: Tomar Jackson

Praxis Poster:

Kelly Deniz Praxis Poster_Final_Resized

 

Further Context:

For the spring 2023 semester, we worked as Public Programming Interns for the City Hall branch of the Philadelphia Visitor Center Corporation. Our supervisor and the head of the City Hall branch, Tomar Jackson, had been looking into revamping the existing tours of City Hall. Currently, the tours take visitors around the exterior and inside. Tomar was interested in developing specialized tours that would be supplemental to the main tour. Through a lot of trial and error, we developed a walking tour that would introduce visitors to the area around City Hall, focusing on historic buildings and public art.

Our tour would proceed as follows:

    1. Start at City Hall. Visitors would learn more about the process of planning and building City Hall and how the structure disrupted the city streets and necessitated the widening of the square it is located in.
    2. South Broad Street and the Avenue of the Arts initiative: Visitors would learn about the initiatives to make the street a center of arts culture as well as become more familiar with Philadelphia’s major arts and music scenes and institutions.
    3. Corner of S. Penn Square and 15th St: Contains two major public art pieces in the area around City Hall, the Clothespin and the Triune. Here the Percent for Art ordinance would be explained, and how that has contributed to a wide variety of public art being present on Philadelphia city streets.
    4. Dilworth Park: Speak about the old Broad Street Station, which used to serve as a hub for aboveground trains, and how much of this moved underground with the creation of Penn Center and “modern” skyscraper cities.
    5. Love Park: Learning about the history of the iconic sculpture in the plaza as well as the park’s creation and its contested history as a skate park.
    6. Mole Street: a few blocks north, Mole Street is a small narrow street between North 15th and North 16th Streets. It contains a number of extremely well-preserved row houses and would serve as a spot for visitors to reflect on the architectural evolution of Center City – especially with views of Comcast Tower and other skyscrapers in the background.
    7. Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA): A chance to see more public art outside the building as well as learn about its design and significance as a center of Philadelphia culture.
    8. Masonic Temple and Municipal Services Building: Discuss Masonic Temple as a structure that predates City Hall and as a building with a rich history and beautiful exterior/interior. Municipal Services Building has a plaza with two more sculptures commissioned as a part of Percent for Art, as well as a statue of Frank Rizzo that was wildly contested before its removal in 2021.
    9. End at City Hall.

Through this process, we learned a lot about Philadelphia history – both about major institutions located near City Hall and as a more “public” history through speaking to the City Hall tour guides and hearing their feedback. We also learned how complex and nuanced the process of tourmaking is, as we revised our plans numerous times due to feedback from Professor Cohen, our Praxis seminar participants, Tomar, and the other City Hall guides. While we are presenting a completed tour, we anticipate it will go through many more stages before being given to visitors. We are excited to see how our work is implemented!

Dora Montgomery, BMC ’24

Buildings in Lower Merion Township

Semester: Spring 2023

Praxis Course: Praxis II – CITY 350 Urban Projects

Faculty Advisor: Jeff Cohen

Field Site: Lower Merion Conservancy

Field Supervisor: Kathleen Abplanalp

Praxis Poster:

Dora Montgomery_Praxis Poster_Final_Resized

 

Further Context:

My project was to take photos of fire insurance surveys kept at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania archives. Fire insurance surveys are records taken of buildings by the Franklin Fire Insurance Company and the Pennsylvania Insurance Company during the nineteenth century. They recorded the dimensions and materials of new buildings in order to assess their insurance costs. Surveys often included plans of the first floors. I specifically documented buildings in Lower Merion Township. The surveys I found range in date from 1820 to 1866. I will be giving my copies of the surveys to Lower Merion Conservancy, a local organization devoted to natural and historical conservation in Lower Merion Township. The Conservancy will, in the future, enter them into a database of buildings in the township accessible by researchers and residents. The surveys, especially the plans, provide valuable information for understanding the types of buildings in the township from the time. I learned, for example, most of the buildings were barns and stables, but there were larger and more interesting homes and public buildings as well.

The first image on my poster is an atlas of Lower Merion Township. Part of my job was to locate the buildings I found in surveys on atlases of the Township. I could not actually use that atlas, as there were no high quality digital copies, but it was the nicest to look at. The next two images are a plan and drawing of Whitehall Inn, a no longer extant hotel built next to Whitehall Station, a train station in Bryn Mawr. Whitehall Inn was demolished, but Whitehall Station still exists, and was renovated into the Bryn Mawr hospital thrift shop. The images below are a snapshot of the location of Whitehall Inn & Station on an atlas from 1851 and two images of Whitehall Station, one from when it was an operating station, one from today.

The next several images are from different surveys from across the Township. They reflect the wide variety of buildings from the period. There is the residential home of John Levering, who was a prominent citizen and himself made a map of the Township. There are the plans of a tenant house, for rent, and a spring house, which was located over a natural spring of water, at Harriton Farm, a large estate in the Township. The Baptist Church, which is just down the street from Bryn Mawr, was also on Harriton Farm. Many of the surveys are not as detailed as those previously displayed, reflected by the sketch of buildings in Merion Square, several of which were owned by D.N. Egbert, but not all. Many plans included additional information about nearby roads and buildings to help situate the buildings being surveyed. The final image is of stables at Whitehall Inn, which resemble most of the surveys found. As one might expect for a agricultural community, most of the buildings surveyed were barns and stables.