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Philly Foundation Launches Architectural Student Design Contest

Pictured from left to right are Maurice Cox, recipient of the 2009 Ed Bacon Foundation prize, Director of Design at the National Endowment for the Arts, Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia, and former mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia; Susan M. Wachter, Professor of Real Estate, Finance and City and Regional Planning at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania; Gregory Heller, Chairman of the Student Design Competition; and Hilda Bacon, board member, Ed Bacon Foundation.

Jane Jacobs, author of the 1961 classic urban planning bible, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, wrote that modernist planning policies had destroyed inner city communities.

Jacobs criticized Edmund Bacon (she called him “a big poobah”), the seminal city planner responsible for the creation of Penn Center and the revitalization of Society Hill. Jacobs disliked the Penn Center plan because of its extensive underground components. She thought the plan left an empty and sterile above ground promenade despite the fact that the Center’s emphasis on underground pedestrian activity was not entirely Bacon’s fault. Somewhere along the line New York real estate broker, Robert Dowling, was brought in to alter Bacon’s design. Dowling’s changes displeased Bacon, but they were implemented anyway. (Dowling’s plan called for roofing over Bacon’s underground shopping plaza).

Unfortunately, Jacobs also had something to say about Bacon’s other lifetime achievement — the revitalization of Society Hill. She objected to what Paul Goldberger of The New Yorker called Bacon’s “bulldozer approach to urban renewal.” Goldberger, in fact, writes of a walk that Jacobs and Bacon took around Society Hill. During that walk, Jacobs wanted to know where all the people were in the “renewed” sections of the neighborhood. According to Goldberger, Bacon replied, “They don’t appreciate these things.”

Jacobs notwithstanding, Philadelphia prior to the work of Edmund Bacon and architect Vincent Kling was a city that inspired little civic pride. The Washington Square and Society Hill neighborhoods, for instance, were nearly in ruins with abandoned or dilapidated buildings. (Jacobs writes about “derelict’ Washington Square in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.) In the 1940s and 1950s, Washington Square was populated by vagabonds, public drunks, and the homeless. Bacon’s plan called for leveling some 19th century houses and making the surrounding Society Hill area comfortable for the urban middle class.

Pre-Bacon Philadelphia was a Sunday Blue Law town with a 10-block stone viaduct extending to the Schuylkill River. Known as the Chinese wall, this medieval looking fortress was connected to the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Frank Furness-designed Broad Street Station. When the wall and Broad Street station were demolished in 1952-53 to make way for Penn Center, Philadelphia was on the map again. Time magazine even cited the project as an excellent example of successful urban renewal. The change was long overdue as Philadelphia was still recovering from one of its greatest failures: the collapse of the 1926 International Sesqui-Centennial, a World’s Fair commemorating the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence of the United States.

The Centennial was a city-within-a-city covering massive parts of South Philadelphia. Judging from the brochures of the period, it held the possibility of being a fantastic success.

A luminous Liberty Bell, some eighty feet high, greeted visitors to the Fair, and countless palaces — from the Taj Mahl looking Persian Building on Edgewater Lake, to the Cuban Building, the India Building, and a Palace of Agriculture with tall towers that would fit quite nicely in the middle of a city like Vienna — provided a striking contrast to the “other” city uptown.

The Fair even displayed a full scale recreation of High Street in 1776, and a dramatic 70 foot high Frank Vittor-designed statue dedicated to the steel industry. Sadly, at the close to the Centennial, all of these structures were demolished, with the exception of the Russian Pavilion, which survives today as a summer picnic venue for random outdoor park barbecues.

Sadly, the world turned a blind eye to Philadelphia’s Sesui-Centennial. With the loss of money and international prestige, came a monumental blow to the city’s ego. After that, Philadelphia seemed to go into hibernation.

Then came the Depression and the bleak WWII years, assuring Philadelphia “joke status” on late night talk shows.

Enter Ed Bacon, the not so quiet Quaker who gave the city its first (conservative) modernist jolt with the creation of Penn Center.

If the idea of a World’s Fair in 2010 seems a quaint, even naive throwback to an earlier time, this has not stopped Philadelphia’s Ed Bacon Foundation from using the idea of a World’s fair as the basis for an international design competition. This year marks the Foundation’s fifth consecutive architectural student design contest. The 2010 theme, “Design the Fair of the Future,” will require students to imagine a Fair in South Philadelphia celebrating the 250th anniversary of the United States. The contest, for the first time, will be open to international students.

“We’ve gotten submissions from Canada in the past,” says Andy Dalzell, Administrator of the Ed Bacon Foundation, “but not going international was mainly a cost consideration. This year we just told the students how much money we can give the winner if he or she comes here to accept the award.”

The prize money, six thousand dollars, would be divided among winning teams of two or more.

“We are very happy to have pre-registrants from all over the world,” Dalzell says, although he adds that registrants sometimes do not follow up with a project. “We do see a drop off. People have big eyes at the beginning of the semester, but then they get swamped with things later.”

Current registrants number about sixty, and include students from China, Iran, the Czech Republic, Australia and Korea. Students register at no cost, and judging takes place during the first or second week in November. The design award will be issued to the winning student at a special ceremony at the Center for Architecture on December 7. At that time, the Center will award Denis Scott Brown of Venturi-Scott Brown Architects in Manayunk, the Ed Bacon Memorial Prize.

Former design contest themes have included Imagining Penn Center (2006), Connecting Market Street (2007), Rebuild/Review (the Ludlow section of Philadelphia, 2008), and Brown to Green (Greys Ferry, 2009).

The idea for the World’s Fair theme was inspired by Ed Bacon’s dream of a 1976 Bicentennial World’s Fair in Philadelphia. Bacon came up with this idea as early as 1959. Although Bacon’s dream was never realized, Mayor Frank Rizzo compromised with a national 1976 Bicentennial, which included the physical reshaping of Chestnut Street into a bus and pedestrian walkway decorated with benches and toy-like Septa stop lights. Unfortunately, this plan worked better as a design concept because Chestnut Street soon turned into a no man’s land, attracting crime and the homeless.

The idea to have students design a World’s Fair in South Philadelphia seemed like a good fit, given, as Dalzell says, the area’s confluence with such places as Fort Mufflin, the stadiums, and FDR Park.

“We wanted to pick a large swath of land that could be developed over the course of the next 16 years.”

Nine prospective neighborhoods were presented as possible locations before the selection of South Philadelphia.

Design students are free to design anything they want. Dalzell adds, “Judges have no pre-conditions. One judge may favor a pie-in-the-sky approach whereas another judge may look at eco factors. If someone comes up with a great plan that can be integrated into the Philly built environment after the Fair, awesome. The real challenge is like the Olympic World Cup. It’s really what happens after the Exposition ends, if the ideas presented can be a vehicle for improving the city’s infrastructure, say public transit. That would be great.”

The City has no plans to implement the winning design.

“Initially it was thought that students might want to design something for the whole city, but this was seen as too daunting. There are still people on the board who think that the idea of South Philadelphia is still too big,” Dalzell says.