With substantial work on the former Psychology Faculty Office Building nearly complete, students and faculty members of the School of Social Work are getting ready to move into the newly upgraded office space, located at 3815 Walnut St.
The renovation, which began last spring and took place over the summer, included the removal of the building's exterior metal netting, in addition to an upgrade of its interior elements such as air conditioning, painting and carpeting.
"It hasn't been a major renovation," University architect Charles Newman said, "just updating and [replacing] elements of the systems. ... The building hadn't been touched in a number of years."
Financial funding for the approximately $350,000 undertaking was provided by both the SSW and the facility-renewal funds.
The decision of the Psychology Department to leave the building for more space at 3410 Walnut St. was easy, according to Department Chairman Rob DeRubeis.
DeRubeis cited the building's poor condition and the department's need for space as the primary motivations for its move.
"The building didn't work very well ... [and] we needed to have more space and be better consolidated as we await phase two of the Life Science buildings."
"Our goal [in moving] was to accommodate a growing faculty and be a bit more consolidated," DeRubeis said.
The building will now house three research programs run by the SSW.
Two of the programs -- the Field Center for Children's Policy, Practice and Research and the Center for Research on Youth and Social Policy -- will move from their current location at 4200 Pine St., where they will join the Evelyn Ortner-Unity Program in Family Violence to occupy the new space.
The SSW decided to make the move due to its need for additional research offices and its desire to be more centrally located on campus.
The Pine Street location "limited the interaction between a lot of the important research the school was doing and the teaching," SSW Dean Richard Gelles said.
"The faculty were reluctant to take the extra space [on Pine], because it was really kind of inconvenient to go back and forth. ... This building affords us the advantage of more space, and more space that is close enough to have the interaction between all our faculty and all our research staff," Gelles added.
Though at one point the SSW toyed with the idea of expanding its central space -- the Caster Building on Locust Walk -- the cost of an addition posed a financial obstacle for the school.
Annexing 3815 Walnut St. proved to be a "much more cost-effective way of getting space and integrating space and research and teaching programs," Gelles said.
According to Gelles, Penn assumed responsibility for the structural and outer features of the building, leaving the remainder of the funding for interior work to the SSW.
The building, originally constructed in 1889 by Frank Furness -- the same architect who designed the Fisher Fine Arts Library -- was actually a twin house, but, over the past century, has experienced substantial outer and inner transformations.
The building's western facade was covered in brick in order to make the two connected edifices more distinct, according to Newman, who believes that the addition was done around the first or second decade of the 20th century.
In 1959, Biological Abstracts converted the homes into office space for its department.
The inside walls of the two buildings were dismantled in order to join the houses and create more room space.
A metal grate was also applied to the building's facade in order to "cosmetically ... make the building look like a[n] ... office building instead of two houses," Newman said.
Many people recognize the building for the large metal structure that protrudes from the front, as much as for its functional purpose as office space.
"The look was quite bad with the grill on the front," DeRubeis said.
Gelles agreed, noting that the SSW decided to use the space on the condition that Facilities and Real Estate Services remove the grate work.
"I'll pay for it, but you got to take the metal grate" off, Gelles recalled telling Facilities Services, adding that, at the time, no one was sure what the consequences of removing the grate would be.
"We really couldn't see ... exactly what they had done behind there or why they had put the screen up, so we took it down, [but] all that we're doing now is just checking the masonry to be sure that it's secure," Newman said.
"The final design solution to the outside will take some time to work out. It's an interesting design problem," Newman said.
Both Newman and Gelles agree that the collaboration between the SSW and Facilities Services has proven beneficial.
"The renovations have been designed working very closely with the School of Social Work," Newman said.
It was a "terrific collaboration between us and facilities," Gelles said.
The SSW is set to occupy the space on Oct. 18.
