Hill House

[skieurope]

From today’s New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/education/edlife/the-worst-college-dorms-sometimes-most-loved.html?_r=0

Hill College House, University of Pennsylvania

Last fall, when Alexis Block was moving into Hill, her father announced that it looked exactly the same as when he had lived there in the early 1980s. “Not really what you want to hear,” Ms. Block said recently.

A brick fortress surrounded by a moat, Hill was designed by the modernist Eero Saarinen in the 1950s. But its rooms are small and narrow. Some first-floor windows have bars on them. And it can be unbearably hot in early fall (air-conditioning will arrive over the next few years; in the meantime, the website warns to bring fans).

Incoming Penn freshmen tend to prefer the Quadrangle, a century-old Tudor Gothic complex, all masonry curlicues and graceful courtyards. “When a majority of your friends live in the Quad, and they’re talking about how comfortable it is, and you’re talking about how you’re sweating all night, it’s like, well, Hill sucks,” said Alex Kaplan, who lived in Hill for the past academic year (and insists he loved it). Quad, which comprises three houses, has its own flaws. It is also old, leaky and, said Jacob Kahn, who spent last year there, favored by vermin, including “interesting long pink insects, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.”

[Nerdyparent]

Sounds like they haven’t renovated since Ben Franklin’s day!

[Penn95]

Haha yeah Hill is a rite of passage for freshmen…lol…they are planning to start the renovation very soon but in my opinion they should just demolish it and build something decent…

[nhparent9]

I really don’t understand this. How can a school with Penn’s resources and reputation for being so wonderful in so many ways, allow this?

[45_Percenter]

Hill will be closed down next year, when the new college house next door will be ready to open for the Fall 2016 semester, and will undergo a complete 1-year renovation that will make it a much more pleasant place for students:

A complete building renovation is being planned to address the maintenance and system upgrades needed for a modern College House. Work will include the conversion of all bathrooms to individual restrooms and shower rooms, renovations to all bedrooms and common spaces, upgrades to MEP systems including air conditioning, and major upgrades to the central kitchen and dining areas. The building masonry envelope with be repointed and all windows will be restored. A new roof will be installed as well as new curtainwall glazing facing the central atrium.

http://www.pennconnects.upenn.edu/find_a_project/planned/planned_g_to_m/hill_college_house_overview.php

And while it might not be to everyone’s taste aesthetically, it IS an architecturally significant building designed by one of the most prominent architects of the mid-20th century (he also designed the St. Louis Gateway Arch and Dulles International Airport):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eero_Saarinen

[Keasbey_Nights]

@nhparent9, if I had to guess, Hill is a necessary dorm to have open because of its proximity to DRL, the engineering quad, etc., and the university’s athletic complexes. To close it for maintenance without replacement would mean that students would have to live significantly farther from those buildings.

NCH will be sufficiently close, at 34th and Chestnut, that the university can close Hill now to renovate it.

Just my hypothesis.

[nhparent9]

@“Keasbey Nights” , I’m sure you are corerct in your assumptions, no argument. My question is how did it get to this point. These renovations should have been managed and implemented years ago.

[aj725]

If you’ve been inside, you’d see that it isn’t an easy building to renovate unless you shut the whole thing down. All the rooms are suite style, so in order to shut down one hallway or one floor to renovate – your are shutting down a LOT more rooms than you would in the Quad or Kings/English bc of the number of rooms in each suite – so all those students have to be re-housed someplace. Plus the entire building is an atrium, so it isn’t easy to shut down a floor and do renovations during the year as the construction noise echoes everywhere in the entire building. In that way the Quad is much easier, they can shut down a hall and work on it for a semester and it isn’t that much of a distraction to anyone else on another hall bc that place is built like a fortress. Given that some of the work in Hill is electrical/HVAC, they need to work on many portions of the building at the same time which just isn’t feasible due to design. I think this is the best possible way – frosh get a brand new dorm (which is going to be SWEET) in fall 2016, which gives the university a whole yr w/ no students in Hill to get the entire project done.