<p>The Penn campus tells a story of a the growth and transformation of one of the world’s finest schools. Penn had no blank slate to build on in any direction as Dartmouth and Cornell did. Penn had no campus master plan to guide its direction and architecture, as Columbia did.</p>
<p>You can see the story in the legacies of the city grid that still criss-cross its leafy campus.</p>
<p>You can see it in Woodland walk, once a campus border that became another walkway when the 19th century trolley was moved underground into a 20th century subway (and you can still hear the subways rumbling underneath).</p>
<p>You can see it in the handful of remaining rowhouses that the campus grew around, absorbed, and repurposed into school buildings.</p>
<p>You can see the terrible toll that 1960s and 70s modernism took on architecture (and society) in the handful of unpleasant modernist buildings.</p>
<p>You can see it in the authentically American genius of the Furness library, which looks unlike any library you have ever seen, rather than aping those of Oxford and Cambridge.</p>
<p>And soon you will see more history being made as the former urban wastelands of the Post Office vehicle fleet yards are transformed into a green urban park.</p>
<p>Penn’s campus and identity are alive and growing in a way that schools who create brand new buildings pretending to be old (<em>cough</em>Princeton’s Whitman college and Yale’s upcoming new colleges) are not. I loved my time there at the campus that is unlike any other.</p>
<p>It’s hard for me not to hold the high-rises against Penn when that’s such an important part of campus for so many upperclassmen. It’s one thing to have some 1970s monstrosity as the headquarters for your major; it’s quite another when that’s the main area where you and your friends are expected to live for years.</p>
<p>I’m not going to rank the campuses, but as I’ve said before, I think that UPenn has a beautiful vibrant campus if you enjoy city schools. I think that the campus has a much more spacious feel than Columbia (although I think that Columbia wins on the surrounding area) and I love Locust Walk.</p>
<p>The postal lands alone are almost as big as Columbia’s entire campus!</p>
<p>Although if you were to demolish and sell off the real estate of both campuses, I imagine the Columbia grounds would still fetch more money than all that lovely new space in West Philadelphia!</p>
<p>@ Hanna
The monstrosity that is Superblock is probably the single worst thing about the Penn campus, remniscent of East Berlin architecture at the height of the Cold War. But the problem is mainly on the exterior and the nasty wind tunnel that the high rises create. The interiors are not bad at all, with the apartment style suites complete with kitchens actually kind of great, especially when compared to the many cinderblock dorm rooms that schools with a similar size to Penn provide.</p>
<p>I’d give the Superblock structures another 30 years before they get demolished. New housing to compensate will be going up on Hill Field (to be renamed Hill Square in the process) and in the postal lands. It will work as shift space while superblock is torn down (hopefully with lasers, since it’s the future ) and replaced with less horrific structures.</p>
<p>I don’t base it on rumor, just simple logic. The buildings are not well-built, as evidenced by their needing a serious $90 million, multi-year renovation after just 30 years of operation (the Quad went almost a century before getting renovations in the early 2000s). In another 30 years there will be a need for an even more thorough renovation, and the costs-benefit analysis will favor new construction over renovation of architecturally insignificant buildings of no preservation value.</p>
<p>As the current eastward expansion-centric Penn Connects Plan is the focus of the university for the next 30 years, a “final solution” for the high-rises will inevitably be the first item on the next major development masterplan when the university turns its attention and capital back to the rest of the campus.</p>
) and replaced with less horrific structures.</p>