EDITORIAL & OPINION: Fine Arts gets its won home

The decision to move the Graduate School of Fine Arts into Skinner Hall Fills a long-standing need for the school. The announcement fulfills Penn's commitment to find a permanent home for the graduate school, which has been left without one since it moved from Smith Hall in 1992 to make way for the construction of the Roy and Diana Vagelos Laboratories along 34th Street between Spruce and Locust streets. A planned move to an old church at the corner of 33rd and Chestnut streets, to be called Addams Hall, fell through when the building went up in flames in the spring of 1997, leaving only an unsalvageable shell. As a result, the Blauhaus, a blue shed on 33rd Street between Chestnut and Walnut streets which was originally constructed as a temporary home for the school, came to serve the department as a home for almost seven years. Now, at long last, the school will have a home of its own at the center of Penn's campus, an area whose buildings continue to become increasingly focused on the University's academic mission. Equally, the probable destruction of the Blauhaus numbers among the aesthetic benefits of the plan. Also aesthetically pleasing are plans to redo Skinner Hall's facade. Such a face-lift would bring the building into greater harmony with surrounding structures and open up the building to Walnut Street, both goals we applaud. Penn has committed $5.2 million for major renovation of the building, which will be ready to house the school in time for fall classes in 2000. Notable among the donors is Barbara Coylton, who had originally given a naming gift for Addams Hall after her late husband, Charles Addams, a 1943 Penn graduate. We thank Coylton for remaining committed to funding a permanent home for Fine Arts. And we look forward to walking down a Walnut Street graced with new Annenberg and Skinner facades facing the completed Sansom Common in a few year's time.