COLUMN: These eyesores are permanent

From Binyamin Appelbaum's, "Carving Marble," Fall '99 From Binyamin Appelbaum's, "Carving Marble," Fall '99This is the story of three bleak, bare and uncomfortable concrete towers, the products of financial constraints and the need to shoe-horn 3,500 undergraduate men onto nine acres of land. But it is worth retelling nonetheless. Because all too often, other stories -- not as true, not as disturbing, not as valuable -- are told in its place. The story begins in 1967, with a decision by the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority to renew the land bounded by 38th and 40th, Walnut and Spruce. To renew the land. To knock down old buildings and build new ones in their places. It was supposed to save the city. When it came time to save Hamilton Village, more than 1,000 people lost their homes. Most of them did not own the buildings they lived in. But it was home all the same. And then it was no longer. Several relics of earlier eras survived, mansions dating from a period when the wealthy had moved across the Schuylkill to then-suburban West Philadelphia. A church and a library made it, too. Everything else was razed. Penn bought the four-block wasteland for a nominal sum and set out to construct on-campus housing for a student body that mostly lived in the surrounding neighborhood. This was to be the grand finale to the greatest building boom in the University's history -- an entire section of campus devoted to dormitories for undergraduate men. Those who live in the products of that grand finale, or simply look up from time to time, have long concluded that there must have been a mistake. Perhaps the structures are temporary, one theory goes. Perhaps they were built with shoddy materials, or never intended to house students. But in the 100 years that man has been building skyscrapers, never has one been built as a temporary structure. The high rises were constructed, by Penn, for the purpose of housing students. Superblock was supposed to hold 3,500 students who had previously chosen between living in the Quad, in a frat or off campus. To do so, Penn moved from plans for modernist, low-rise quadrangles to plans for modernist, high-rise towers. "The fact was, that if you were going to put 3,500 students on that block, that was the only way you could do it.? You go up in the air." G. Holmes Perkins, Superblock architect. At first, there were to be five such towers, each thinner than the present high rises, combining to create a more uniform skyline. But when a concrete contractor pointed out that 10 percent could be shaved from the project cost by combining the five structures into three, each with a broader footprint, Penn jumped at the opportunity. And thus the high rises were born. Three austere triplets on four blocks of land -- skyscrapers because of cold, pragmatic considerations, modernist concrete skyscrapers because of an aesthetic style grounded in some notion of faithfulness to reality. Thirty years later, the sheer minimalism is painful to look at, worse to live in. Fortunately, 30 years is a magic number of sorts. Most buildings last no longer than that without undergoing major renovations. It is simply the way we are when it comes to buildings. Each generation wants to make them their own. Perhaps this time around, Penn will do better by its students. The financial constraints are not what they once were.The winds have shifted against aesthetic modernism; we have post-modernism's eclectic tribute architecture in its place. But there is one problem that remains unsolved; one certainty that hasn't changed. Again, G. Holmes Perkins: "People's attitudes towards architecture change every generation. When you begin to look around from one generation to another, the only thing you can be sure of is that the next generation won't like it."