FACULTY PROFILE: Prof sees history in buildings

When George Thomas hears University students discussing plans to study at "Fur-NESS," he cringes involuntarily. The correct pronunciation of the building that houses the Fisher Fine Arts Library -- and the name of the man who designed it -- is "furnace," according to Thomas, an adjunct professor of historic preservation and urban studies who has spent much of his career researching and refurbishing architect Frank Furness's work. Although it is not easy to buck a trend begun by a slip of the tongue at a ceremony decades ago, Thomas simply wants Furness, one of his favorite Philadelphians, to get some respect. "Furness probably did 800 buildings in the course of his career," Thomas said recently, describing the architect's prolific accomplishments. "That's a building every other week for 40 years, across the entire region." Furness was also artistically unique because he wanted his buildings to represent "the who of what we are" -- which is also the goal of Thomas's undergraduate Urban Studies seminar, called "Architecture, Location and Class." "[The library] doesn't want to be a Gothic cathedral, it wants it to be a building that is a library and tells us about its multiple uses by the way it looks," he said. A quick glance at Furness's building will convince even the most casual observer that it is no ordinary academic structure. Its true genius lies in the fact that it is not finite, and was built to accommodate the future growth of the University's book collection, he added. The architect's popularity is the result of Furness's skillful adaptation of ideas to "the real world," Thomas said, along with his ability to capture the mechanical, problem-solving essence of Philadelphia's citizens. But Thomas is more than a connoisseur of century-old urban architecture. His historic preservation consulting firm has completed projects around the East Coast, including the rehabilitation of the Benedum Center, an opera house in Pittsburgh, and a brownstone house that belonged to former Provost Charles Krauth at 40th and Pine streets. But Thomas said his favorite project is still the restoration of the Furness building, because it offered him the chance to work with colleagues from the architectural firm of Venturi, Scott, Brown and provided challenges related to making a 19th Century library work for the 21st Century. "To participate in the rebuilding of this campus into one of the [country's] great urban spaces was a great experience," he said. When he arrived at the University as a graduate student in 1966, the area that is now College Green was nothing more than a muddy plot. "I have a lot of fun using buildings as a way to get people to focus on the big historical questions of who we are and what we've accomplished," Thomas added. "Architecture seems to be a great way to walk back a century-and-a-half, arrive at an understanding, and apply it to our time and place," he said. This semester, to gain such an understanding, Thomas' seminar is addressing the question of how Philadelphians of years past -- specifically merchants and industrialists -- represented who they were by where they chose to live and who they selected to build their homes. Thomas said he finds the course both amusing and fun, because he reinvents it every year, placing emphasis on another aspect of city life. "Teaching is always such a release for me, a chance to plug back in with kids," he said, adding that he is helped in this endeavor by the University's diverse student body. "I always enjoy the new things they are doing, it reinvigorates me." College senior Jase Feinstein said that as a psychology major, he enrolled in Thomas's class because "the title sounded neat." He has not been disappointed. "[Thomas's] enthusiasm comes through, it's infectious," Feinstein said. "He tears down the walls of formality between faculty and students?little bits of his everyday life come through, and that makes him seem more human -- he's the best." Feinstein added that Thomas's extensive knowledge of the University and its history is a key component of the course. "Every time I give a tour?I find his words coming out of my mouth," he joked. Thomas summed up his educational philosophy succinctly, in a way which would no doubt have pleased founder Benjamin Franklin. "[The University] is a college about the here and now, not the there and then," he said.

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