Save the Roundhouse

Despite the picture painted in this article, the Roundhouse is appreciated for more than being "quirky" and by more people than those in "some architectural circles," as is District Health Center No. 1 at Broad and Lombard streets.

Everett Gillison, deputy mayor for public safety and Mayor Nutter's chief of staff said of the Provident Mutual Life Insurance building, "Great old buildings don't have to be destroyed to have a great adaptive reuse." A statement that rings as true for this building as it does for the District Health Center and the Roundhouse.

Council bills open way to move police headquarters to West Philadelphia PHILADELPHIA With no fanfare, the long-discussed plan to build a new, high-tech police headquarters in one of Philadelphia's stately old buildings took a major step toward reality last week.

This semester at Georgia Tech, a group of twelve undergraduate architecture students have been collaborating on an architectural design studio focusing on the Roundhouse. The studio involves the construction of a physical model as well as the production of a Revit 3D model of the Roundhouse. Both serve as valuable resources when designing an expansion of the building and considering the reuse potential of the Roundhouse interior. The studio will consider two use alternatives for the site, which includes the addition of high density housing with the historic structure converted to an amenity/community center and corporate/general office use, with the Roundhouse housing support functions such as food service, common meeting rooms, product display, etc. The final designs will require attention to the design of the addition, the reuse of the Roundhouse, the development of a connection between the two and consideration of site design features. The course is being taught by Jack Pyburn, FAIA who is the 2013 Harrison Design Associates Visiting Scholar in Historic Preservation in the Georgia Tech School of Architecture. Stay tuned for updates!

"If we can’t save it all, the question is how we know what will be beautiful in the future—and what the people of 2063 will have wanted us to keep for them."

Can buildings be too young to save? - The Boston Globe It’s possible to love a city without loving all its buildings. That’s a lucky thing for Boston, where some of the most notable works of architecture since the 1960s are also the most loathed. There are the looming twin towers of the JFK Federal Building (1966), the forbidding 1972 addition to the Ce...

This photo from 1962 shows the Roundhouse under construction and also offers a glimpse of the neighborhood that once surrounded the building. This area was often referred to as "Skid Row" and although it was a dynamic neighborhood, it had a multitude of abandoned and under-utilized buildings. Jane Jacobs provides a telling description of the neighborhood in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities: “The second of Penn’s little parks is Franklin Square, the city’s Skid Row park where the homeless, the unemployed and the people of indigent leisure gather amid the adjacent flophouses, cheap hotels, missions, second hand clothing stores, reading and writing lobbies, pawnshops, employment agencies, tattoo parlors, burlesque houses and eateries. This park and its users are both seedy, but it not a dangerous or crime park. Nevertheless, it has hardly worked as an anchor to real estate values or to social stability.”