COLUMN: Trial and error makes perfect

From Binyamin Appelbaum's, "Carving Marble," Fall '99 From Binyamin Appelbaum's, "Carving Marble," Fall '99For reasons your parents will be happy to explain, various people in various places spent much of the 1960s building walls through the hearts of cities to keep various groups apart. Most of the buildings along Walnut between 34th and 38th were built during the 1960s and early '70s. And most of those buildings were designed to keep Penn students in and West Philadelphia residents out. Thirty years later, the Walnut Street wall is finally crumbling, because Penn has finally decided to act on a fundamental truth of urban design: If you create places for people to interact, they will. If you open up streets and add entrances, people will use them. If you tear down the walls between community and campus, interaction becomes inevitable. This isn't a new truth. Indeed, it's a very old one. But Penn's desire to facilitate and foment interaction with the surrounding community is new. And it is accompinied by a recognition that all of the human resources in the world can't realize that newfound commitment without landscaping and architecture to match. And so, the newly renovated Annenberg School features a street-friendly design, a glass-walled library and a Walnut Street entrance to boot. Across the way, Sansom Common's open-air tables, broad sidewalks and display windows make the north side of Walnut Street eminently hospitable. To the west, Huntsman Hall's rotunda will cap the four-block stretch at 38th and Walnut, and renovations to both the erstwhile Faculty Club and Gimbel Gymnasium will bring two more sections of the brick canyon's walls tumbling down. Indeed, in five year's time, only a few stigmatized stretches of Walnut Street will remain. That is progress -- and also a reminder that progress needs to continue until nothing remains of the Walnut Street Wall. One section that does remain for the time being, the Social Sciences complex, is a particularly glaring example of hostile architecture. The buildings' collective effect on passersby was perhaps best described by a Penn student writing in the 1960s: "The monotonous effect of the brick is broken up only by the monotonous effect of the windows." Not exactly welcoming. But no worse than the neighboring Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. The Center's cold-shoulder architecture -- highlighted by an ostensible entrance that resembles nothing so much as a medieval portcullis -- is all the more glaring now that construction on the neighboring Annenberg School and facing Sansom Common is complete. And then there's Van Pelt Library. Whatever you may think of Van Pelt's College Green facade, there is little doubt that its Walnut Street side was built without pedestrians in mind. Tragically for Walnut Street, that has long meant that Van Pelt's contribution to street life is a parking lot and a brick wall with a reflective mirror on top. Equally unfortunate is Dietrich Graduate Library's unmitigated expanse of red brick, stretching from Van Pelt's parking lot up to 36th Street. If this makes it sound like Walnut Street still has a ways to go, it does. But this time around, Penn is on the right track. Some will say that it shouldn't have taken 30 years to get here. After all, outdoor seating and public benches aren't exactly innovative. Keeping streets well-lit and clean is hardly a revolutionary idea. Making sure buildings have windows and street-level entrances is just about the oldest trick in the book. But I'm not so sure Walnut Street could have been done right any sooner. And I'm certain that the street wouldn't have the opportunity to turn out so well if trial-and-error construction wasn't given time to work its strange magic. For cities grow best when they are given time to grow; when buildings stand where they did 30 years before, changing and adapting to their surroundings over time. After all, it was precisely urban renewal's belief in the possibility of creating perfection from scratch that got the movement into so much trouble in the first place. Sometimes there is simply no way to know how to do something right until you've done it wrong. And sometimes that takes 30 years to figure it out. That's a topic your parents probably know something about, too.