Campus plan finds a few snags

As the Campus Development Plan 2001 begins to affect the planning of construction at Penn, several experts and officials are noting that parts of the 25-year proposal may be jeopardized by external problems and conflicts of interest between donors and the University. The plan, unveiled at February's meeting of the Board of Trustees, was designed in consultation with the Olin Partnership -- a firm led by Penn Architecture Professor Laurie Olin. Among the plan's most ambition projects are a foot bridge across the Schuylkill River to connect Locust Walk with Locust Street, as well as massive development of the western bank of the river adjacent to Penn's campus. But while officials are optimistic about the future campus that the plan offers, there are several concerns about the implementation of the plan. To begin with, it was announced last month that the U.S. Postal Service, the organization that currently owns the lands on which Penn bases its hope of eastern expansion, would not be moving out of the area in the very near future. The Postal Service has placed a freeze on projects due to financial difficulties. And funding of Penn's project -- which is admittedly piecemeal -- may end up being dictated by the wishes of donors over and above the wishes of the University. Furthermore, the eastern expansion of the plan was first mandated almost a decade ago, and with a few notable exceptions -- such as the creation of the Left Bank Apartments -- it has yet to materialize. Perhaps the biggest factor in implementing the widespread changes in the face of campus is that of financing the various projects. Officials say that these will largely be funded as individual donors choose to endow large projects, but they admit that this will make for a very long process. "The disadvantages are that [the piecemeal funding] will be a lengthy process and we will need to make our vision for the campus coincident with the vision of our donors," Vice President for Finance Craig Carnaroli said. But Carnaroli also noted that reliance on donors is necessary, particularly given the comparatively small size of Penn's endowment. "It's sort of what we have to do," Carnaroli said. According to architect Denise Scott Brown, who worked on the last major campus plan in the early 1990s, such broad-ranging plans as the one recently presented to the Trustees can have some impact on the face of the University. And some of the biggest changes at Penn in the last decade occurred as a direct result of this plan. "Out of our master planning studies came the Perelman Quad," Scott Brown said. Scott Brown has been affiliated with the University since the 1950s and has worked on many master plans. According to Scott Brown, the vague nature of the goals outlined by the Campus Development Plan 2001 are not a unique aspect of this particular plan, as many master plans deal more with broad situations and future expectations than with specific projects. The most recent plan that she worked on for Penn made no calls for particular buildings. "It didn't call for buildings as such," Scott Brown said. "It talked about relationships." Pennsylvania State University Architect Dave Zehngut, who recently helped complete a master plan for his university, agreed that the job of master plans is to present a broad overview and not specifics. "The way we think of it is that it's a framework," Zehngut said. "It has to offer you some flexibility because of changes over time." However, Penn Architecture Professor Patricia Conway criticized the current master plan for confining itself to a broad overview of goals. "Personally, I find [the campus development plan] rather disappointingly underambitious, in the sense that there's nothing that I've read that is more than a general statement of a goal," Conway said. Many of the goals outlined in the new master plan were first discussed in the one Scott Brown worked on, particularly the desire to strengthen pedestrian walkways. In fact, a focus of her study was how pedestrian traffic at Penn moved. "When we were doing the plan, we tried to map people's pathways through the campus," she said. And Conway said yesterday that Penn's desire to expand eastwards -- as opposed to the traditional drive to expand westward -- came out of Scott Brown's work. "Denise did a totally different plan which identified in very general terms a plan that called for expansion toward the east and an expansion slightly toward the south," Conway said. But while this call for development of the eastern part of campus is almost a decade old, much of it depends on acquiring the postal lands, and the Postal Service announced last month that it was delaying its proposed move out of the city to the region around the Philadelphia International Airport. Penn officials remain confident that the move will happen eventually, and that Penn will finally be able to acquire the land east of campus. But even so, they admit that the situation is, largely, out of their hands. "We understand that there are issues that are beyond the local concerns and that are related to funding issues in Washington," Vice President of Facilities Services Omar Blaik said.