Archinect - News

University of Pennsylvania appoints Rossana Hu as Architecture Chair

2023-04-12T17:13:00-04:00

The University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design has announced its appointment of Neri&Hu Design and Research Office co-founder Rossana Hu as the next chair of its Department of Architecture.

Hu, who is currently on the faculty of the College of Architecture & Urban Planning at Tongji University in Shanghai, will take over chair duties effective January 1st of next year. Current associate professor and MArch program director Andrew Saunders will lead in an interim role beginning in the fall.

Hu will become the third woman to serve as the department’s chair and continues a relationship with China that has been long-established at the school since the beginning of the 1920s.

“We see ourselves as mediators: between past and present, individual and collective, public and private, rural and urban,” Hu said of her firm’s approach to design, before adding, “It’s clear that the faculty and students at Penn are equally committed to this vision.”

Related on Archinect: The Wei...

Catherine Seavitt Nordenson to chair the Landscape Architecture Department at the Weitzman School of Design

2023-03-28T15:04:00-04:00

The Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania has announced that Catherine Seavitt Nordenson will be taking over as the next chair of its Department of Landscape Architecture, effective July 1st.

The current Spitzer School of Architecture professor and director of CCNY's Master of Landscape Architecture program will replace Richard Weller and will be the third woman ever to lead the department following Anne Whiston Spirn and professor Sonja Dümpelmann, who had been serving as its interim chair since last spring.

A press announcement from the university called Seavitt “one of the most admired scholar-practitioners of her generation.” Her career began as an Associate at New York’s Atelier Raimund Abraham in 1993 and has made stops at Pei Cobb Freed and Partners in addition to the academic appointments at Parsons, the University of Virginia, and two of her alma maters Princeton and the Cooper Union.

Seavitt, both a registered architect and landscape architect, also ...

Historian Amber Wiley to lead UPenn's Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites

2022-09-19T09:00:00-04:00

Award-winning architectural and urban historian Amber Wiley has been announced by the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design as the inaugural Matt and Erika Nord Director of the Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites (CPCRS).

The current Rutgers University assistant professor will also hold the title of Presidential Associate Professor and lecture primarily in the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation. Wiley holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from George Washington University in addition to degrees in Architecture and Architectural History from Yale and the University of Virginia.

From Wiley's 2021 CPCRS talk titled “The Revolution Continues.” Image courtesy UPenn.

She comes to the new positions highly recommended as the author of the forthcoming title Model Schools in the Model City: Race, Planning, and Education in the Nation’s Capital and curator of Collective Yearning: Black Women Artists from the Zimmerli Art Museum, now on view at Rutgers’ New Bru...