Waiting outside an apartment just past 40th and Spruce streets, College senior Peter Logan looked like an indie version of Mad Max, with slim jeans and a black jacket festooned with zippers. It was a Saturday night in September and like most students who had ventured past the western edge of campus, Logan was dressed to party. But the event he was about to enter - an invitation-only gathering at 4047 Spruce - would turn out to be anything but your garden-variety, Natty Ice grind fest.
A friend ushered him in through the hallway to the living room, where fifteen or so students were spread about the dimly lit, blue-walled room. On one side a handful of undergrads sat on couches sipping Yuenglings and mixed drinks. Across the room another group clustered around a wobbly table.
At the table's center, a tower constructed of crisscrossed wooden Jenga pieces teetered on the verge of collapse. The skeletal structure was riddled with so many holes that every successive turn seemed to be its last. And yet, in seeming defiance of gravity, the rectangular blocks gutted from the edifice continued to collect at the top, and the spindly tower crept higher and higher.
The game concluded like all games of Jenga: with a measure of disappointment. Someone dragged their drink across the shaky table, causing the tower to buckle and topple, spilling pieces across the table and the floor.
As the night progressed, more guests filtered in. Logan, who had started a new game of Jenga, began to question whether it was possible to beat the game to the point "where you physically can't go any further." His preoccupation with structure continued as he proceeded to arrange the blocks to resemble Stonehenge. Nearby, three girls stood up and began dancing. Before long they sat back down, resigned that their attempts to liven up the atmosphere had failed. "You know why we can't get a party?" one dancer commented. "It's because we don't have ambience."
They had an excuse: most of the party's guests were architecture majors. And in the veiled world of undergraduate architecture, long work hours and insanely involved projects collide so that the spheres of academic and social life become one and the same.
Undergraduate architecture at Penn is as rigorous as math or physics. But instead of doing problem sets and taking the occasional exam, architecture students work on amassing a body of drawings and models that are evaluated at the end of the semester. The tasks range from constructing small containers and drawings to modeling landscapes and buildings. Given the specialized material and intense work hours that architecture projects require, the major creates a close-knit group of students - there are only a combined total of 58 junior and senior architecture majors at Penn - who straddle the line between strict pre-professionalism and full-on art school.
In addition to Penn, four other Ivy League schools - Cornell, Columbia, Princeton and Yale - offer architecture as an undergraduate field of study. Of them, Cornell alone grants a five-year professional degree. The rest are four-year liberal arts programs, meaning students cannot take the licensing exam. While Penn's undergraduate program is affiliated with PennDesign - the graduate school that comprises programs in architecture, city planning, landscape architecture, fine arts, digital media design, and visual studies - the major itself is housed within the College of Arts and Sciences. This reflects its liberal arts orientation; students fulfill all the general education requirements of the College in addition to the six-semester sequence of design studios, theory and art history courses in order to earn their degree.
This configuration allows Penn's program to be more theoretical and interdisciplinary in its approach. Whereas students at Cornell take studio courses as freshmen and must adhere to a fairly narrow regimen of courses, students at Penn do not start coursework for their major until their sophomore year and can only formally declare themselves in the major as juniors. "When you have a young person who's thinking about what they're going to do, we want them to come into the program and explore things and think laterally," explained Richard Wesley, the undergraduate program's chairman.
The delayed start has been a boon to students like Ben Silverman, a senior architecture major who came to Penn intending to study mechanical engineering. He said that the fact that architecture was only a three-year program allowed him to "test it out" relatively risk-free before deciding to proceed.
Many students take advantage of the liberal curriculum and major or minor in other subjects. "We've had pre-med architecture students, engineering dual-degree students," said Wesley. While it's easy to see how a degree in art history or environmental studies could inform one's approach to an architectural problem, students have cobbled other arrangements as well. Jessi Turner, a senior majoring in philosophy and architecture, said the conceptual insights she draws from philosophy invariably affect - for the better - the way she thinks about design.
While most architecture students see the various advantages of having a liberal arts program, many also feel that Penn's approach works better in principle than in reality. Juniors and seniors take two-credit studio courses that meet twice a week and for four hours per class. Sections, capped at 12 students each, all meet at the same time.
"The studio doesn't fit well in the context of all the other classes and things students have to take," said Wesley. "And it's a special kind of student who can balance both of those because there are conflicts and hours in the studio, hours outside the studio." He recalled that when he first started teaching at Penn, facilities called him to complain that his students never turned off the lights in their classrooms. "And I called the person up and said, 'You don't understand - they're working.'"
The junior and senior studios occupy an entire wing on the second floor of Charles Addams Fine Arts Hall. Here, upperclassmen are assigned rollaway desks, which they use as one might expect: to draft designs, build models and store various books and supplies. But they also use them to eat their lunches and dinners, socialize and study for their non-major courses. The senior studio, which lacks partitions, resembles the newsroom of a major daily. Conversations flare up easily, and getting someone's attention is as straightforward as yelling their name.
"Ten p.m. is magic hour," said Brad Gulick, a junior architecture major, "if you're not in here you feel guilty."
As each semester progresses, old and current projects collect around the studio like dust on desks, windowsills and the floor. There are landscape models made of chipboard, row homes constructed of wood, fine sheets of wrapped paper and thin slabs of posterboard. Other relics persist as well: half-empty water bottles, stale cups of coffee, cans of diet root beer and bags of M&M's lay scattered across the room. According to a recently instituted rule, janitors are only allowed to throw away things on the floor.
Last year, a few juniors were so overwhelmed by work that they took rolls of tracing paper and wrote "NEVER SACRIFICE YOUR CRAFT" in scarlet lettering, and then tacked it on the wall of their studio. In the same room, the juniors, who would "drink and draft" from time to time, amassed so many bottles of Corona, Hoegaarden, and Yuengling that they began to arrange them artfully on their window's ledge. They were only removed by the janitors in preparation for Family Weekend.
Work that is completed in the semester is done with an eye to the final review. Like a cumulative exam, the final review - known by majors as the "final crit" - is a long and thorough evaluation of the semester's material. Each studio professor brings in three or four outside academics and professionals and together they compose the jury that critiques the work for his or her section.
For most students, the review is preceded by a caffeine-fueled all-nighter at the studio. When they've done as much as time will allow, students shuffle into the gallery on the first floor of Addams Hall and tack their work onto the walls. During the critique, which can stretch on for six hours or more, students take turns presenting their projects to the panelists and listening to the work of their peers. While panelists have no bearing on students' grades, the atmosphere is unnerving because of the public and critical nature of the review.
"You hope to be articulate," said Hernan Garcia, a senior architecture major. He explained that after pulling an all-nighter, being able to convey meaning properly was his chief concern during his final reviews last year.
Much of the same anxieties hold true for midterm critiques, which usually convene once or twice before a final review, though they tend to be more informal affairs. In October, senior architecture majors in Professor Anita Berrizbeitia's studio section presented their projects - redesigns of College Green - to a panel consisting of Berrizbeitia and two other critics.
The critique - phrased in thick architectural-theoretical jargon - sounded akin to a foreign language. When it was Peter Logan's turn to present his design of College Green - one that turned the grassy knoll between Woodland Walk and Van Pelt Library into an undulating patchwork of cement and grass - he explained his space as one that would give the grass the usefulness of an open, traversable plaza, while retaining both the look and pleasure of a grassy field.
"How will people refer to this - meet me at the bumps?" said Berrizbeitia with a small laugh.
"It's very much like a labyrinth," agreed a landscape designer who was part of the panel.
Logan looked a bit rankled. He later expressed that part of the difficulty with the field is that everyone has their own idea of what constitutes good architecture. Logan wondered if a good review could be gained - at least in part - by appealing to the critic's ego and simply taking their suggestions.
Gulick agreed, saying that because architecture is subjective, it is up to the student to parse the often-conflicting advice that different professors give.
"It goes back to the question of where you put your pencil down," said Gulick, "and more importantly, when you go away from the drawing board." Sitting inside the senior studio on a Saturday night, Gulick looked bleary-eyed as he explained that in his mind, the physical end of a project occurred after a review, but even then it remained incomplete. Gulick said he found it impossble to ever really leave the "drawing board." He remembered obsessing over ways he could have improved projects days and weeks after they had been reviewed, wondering what he could have created if he had only had more time.
If creating projects that are at once creative and well-executed were their only worry, most architecture majors said their academic lives would be significantly easier to manage. Because Penn's undergraduate program is speculative and exploratory in its approach, most projects rarely take into account questions of feasibility. In theory, it's a program that is more interested in generating ideas than in equipping students with the technical computer tools they might apply to professional practice.
"In grad school a lot of [the emphasis] is in 3D modeling - virtual kind of shit," said one graduate of Penn's program, citing the fact that students who had not studied architecture as undergrads and had to get to speed the summer before entering were basically on par with those who had.
"Their skills and my skills in representation are about the same. And it's embarrassing because I've had three years of that."
While Gulick said he understands misgivings about the program's lack of technical instruction, he argued that the process of learning those tools independently is an inherent part of the undergraduate program. "Sitting in front of a computer and having someone teach you is fine but to learn it and struggle about it on your own is more rewarding, isn't it? There's no notion here that we're being spoon-fed anything."
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While Penn's program pushes the artistic dimensions of architecture, at first eschewing the practical considerations of design in favor of a kind that is more speculative and impractical, toward the end of junior year students begin tackling problems that have real-life implications.
As part of the art history requirement for the major, Gulick and Logan took Professor David Brownlee's course on modern architecture this past spring. In one assignment they were tasked with writing on Skirkanich Hall, the moss-green bioengineering building that towers six-stories tall between the Moore and Towne Buildings on 33rd Street.
While some members of the Penn community, like University President Amy Gutmann and Engineering Dean Eduardo Glandt, touted it as a marvel of modern architecture when it officially opened last October, others have been less impressed. "They're clearly trying to do something with the outside," one Engineering student told The Daily Pennsylvanian when the building first opened last year. "But I don't see it." Another student noted that the interior was difficult to navigate.
On a recent blustery Sunday afternoon, Gulick, Logan and Garcia took a break from their work at the studio to tour Skirkanich. In the courtyard in the center of the engineering complex, the three of them stood on the lip of the square's slab fountain and gazed into the rear of Skirkanich's brick and glass fa‡ade.
Garcia argued that those who don't like the building "don't appreciate the details." Logan and Gulick agreed.
The green brick, and the way the glass arranges itself on the left side, Logan noted, bridges the buildings it is wedged between, while figuratively bridging the adjacent traditional buildings with the more modern Levine Hall.
Observing the three look up repeatedly - in the stairwell, over the rail in Skirkanich's lobby, and on the fourth floor, when Garcia and Gulick followed Logan as he hunted for the restroom - it was obvious that they all shared a keen eye for minutia, and that architecture had provided them with a certain way of understanding the world.
The three agreed that Skirkanich's architects were successful in making the building engage the public, a point that several majors said contributes to why architecture is such a fascinating field of study.
"Although design is very personal, and that's where it begins, we say in the end that you need to project yourself out into society and do something to benefit people in the environment," said Professor Wesley.
With the junior and senior classes both undertaking sustainable housing projects for low-income residents in West Philadelphia next semester, it is clear that a tremendous amount of work and many sleepless nights are ahead of them. But perhaps what will inevitably keep these architecture majors going is what has always kept them going: a studio packed, for better or worse, with two dozen close friends and a burning passion for their craft.
One afternoon in the studio, Logan mused that maybe in spite of all the time he and his fellow majors spent immersed in their studies, they still didn't know all that much about architecture.
A classmate interjected from a few feet away: "But we know each other - maybe too much"
