Archinect - News

UPenn Weitzman School extends dean Fritz Steiner's tenure to 2027

2024-11-11T08:00:00-05:00

The University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design has announced it will be extending the tenure of dean Frederick "Fritz" Steiner for two additional years through June 30th, 2027.

He joined the school early 2016 in part a protest of the controversial "campus carry" weapons policy that was enacted at the University of Texas at Austin. Since that time, Steiner has been credited with improving the school financial position and bolstered DEI efforts for both students and faculty.

Steiner, who also holds a prestigious Paley Professorship and teaches in the departments of city and regional planning and landscape architecture, said: “I couldn’t be prouder of the work that our faculty, students, and alumni are doing to build a better future. When you bring artists, designers, planners, and preservationists together, the possibilities are thrilling.”

Get Lectured: University of Pennsylvania, Fall '24

2024-08-23T14:06:00-04:00

Get Lectured continues today with a look at the events happening in the Fall semester at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design.

September’s slate of lecturers includes Pezo von Ellrichshausen (September 4); Aislinn Pentecost-Farren (September 13); Sue Anne Kahn (September 18); Derek Hyra (September 19); the Urban Heritage Project (September 25); Lina Gothmeh (September 25); and Jonathan Oliveras (September 26).

Lecture poster courtesy of the Stuart Weitzman School of Design

The next month will see speakers Laurie Olin (October 1); Marina Tabassum (October 9); Tom Daniels (October 16); Lori Gibbs (October 24); the 2024 Witte-Sakamoto Family Prize in City and Regional Planning winners from Charlotte, NC (October 24); and Nocturnal Medicine’s founders Larissa Belcic and Michelle Farang Shofet (October 24).

Steven Holl begins the next month of lectures on November 6, followed by Jeremy Kamal (November 7); Zhang Ke (November 13); Rosetta Elkin (November 14); and ...

Honoring the achievements of China’s first female architect one hundred years later

2024-06-24T17:38:00-04:00

On May 18, 2024, the University of Pennsylvania awarded Lin Huiyin (林徽因) with an architecture degree, exactly 100 years after they refused to admit her into their undergraduate program because she was a woman. [...] With the news of Lin’s belated degree quickly going viral on Chinese social media, her name is again in the public eye. It is therefore a good opportunity to revisit her legacy and correct the prejudice and stereotypes that have overshadowed Lin’s story.

Lin Huiyin’s story was included in the Weitzman School’s 2022 exhibition ‘Building in China: A Century of Dialogues on Modern Architecture,’ which examined her and her classmates' influence in China after 1920. Often detracting from it are accounts of her personal life and relationship with Liang Sicheng. Lin’s stellar academic coursework went unrewarded even after UPenn’s decision to grant credit to female Bachelor of Architecture students after 1934. Her granddaughter, Yu Kui, accepted the diploma on her behalf at the school's commencement ceremonies last month.

On the evening of May 18th, local time in the United States, at the graduation ceremony of the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design, Lin Huiyin's granddaughter, Yu Kui, accepted the long-delayed degree certificate on behalf of Lin Huiyin from the dean of… pic.twitter.com/TZBPIsARUF
— Hola Fujian (@HolaFujian) May 19, 2024

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...