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WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK
PHILADELPHIA, PA 19106
Q: Why were you attracted to this project?
Venturi: First, there is the context of the site, Washington Square, as one of the four squares that distinguish William Penn’s original plan of the city. Then, there is the varied and vital development of the architecture that defines the Square as it has historically evolved — involving, over time, demolition as well as development.
Q: What makes the Square architecturally interesting?
Venturi: Its architectural quality — formal and stylistic — is dynamically varied, and out of this varied complexity evolves a vital kind of unity.
Here are combined, as they define the square, the Victorian Haas Building, the Art Deco N.W. Ayer Building, the Frank Furness bank over which looms the high-rise Modern style apartment house under construction, a series of Benjamin Latrobe townhouses, the huge Georgian style Curtis Publishing Company loft building, the Marion Locks Gallery as the Louis Seize hotel, the Victorian Lippincott Publishing Company, the Classical Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company loft replacing early 19th century townhouses, the Hopkinson condominium complex as a late- Corbusian slab replacing John Haviland’s First Presbyterian Church, and then of course, the Italian Revival style Athenaeum by John Notman.
Q: What about the building that now stands at the Dilworth House Condominiums?
Venturi: The former home of Mayor Dilworth and his wife is a mid-18th century Pennsylvania farmhouse, which replaced authentic early 19th century houses. So a replacement of the replica within this context works to follow a long architectural/historical tradition that exemplifies this Square.
Q: What is the conceptual context of this new building?
Venturi: It is of building that contains a lobby and toward the rear a parking area whose back part is not covered, but enclosed, by a brick garden-like wall.
The next stories each contain a spacious apartment with balconies front and back; the upper two stories contain a two-story penthouse with similarly positioned balconies.
On the south side is a party wall with, of course, no windows against the existing party wall of the Lippincott Building; on the north side there is a wall which starts as a party wall at its west end as it fits along the party wall of the Athenaeum, and then via a series of setbacks in plan, creates space for windows on our building, and amenity for the Athenaeum where its setbacks and back gardens occur.
The front façade facing the Square to the west is composed of brownstone surfaces with limestone trim — materials analogous to those surface materials in their hues and values of the historical buildings on each side. The façade, like the neighboring buildings, also has a base, a middle, and a top in its composition, although in contrast to those buildings there are indents within the flat surface of the façade created via the arcade on ground level, the series of terrace-porches in the stories above, and the setback behind the upper arcade of the final two stories containing the penthouse — so here are combinations of analogy and contrast within the composition which work to create harmony.
Also, the consistency of the overall order is broken within the ground level composition and at the top, where there is juxtaposed symmetry and asymmetry. Such contradictions work to create aesthetic tension while accommodating complex programmatic interior requirements.
So here is a building brown and white, symmetrical and asymmetrical, flat and deep within its façade. And its arcade below creates a sense of openness toward the community and a place within which can be a graphic-sculptural reference to the preceding use of the site in its historical evolution. And like many of the other buildings on the Square it is stylistically of its time and yet at home in its context.
And it can increase the vitality of the civic space as a square by increasing and enriching its uses.
Q: What will be the Gestalt of the project?
Venturi: The inclusion of this building with its particular program will increase activity on the Square and thereby enhance the vitality of the place.
Perhaps the Dilworth house whose symbolism recalls that of a mid-18th-century Pennsylvania farmhouse was and is questionably appropriate for a setting from the beginning explicitly urban and whose architectural development evolved in the late 18th century. Therefore the proposed reference to Mayor Dilworth and his role in establishing Society Hill via the design of the new project should be more appropriate.