Unscientific Survey: The Singer Building
My most admired person of the week is the lone soul who, in responding to our unscientific survey on Swarthmore College’s new Maxine Frank Singer ‘52 Hall (to be the home of the psychology, biology, and engineering departments), chose the option “Too soon to tell.” Everybody else had an opinion — despite the fact that the building isn’t even fully operational yet!
And the opinions were on the whole — almost 66 percent — negative; the biggest single vote-getter was “I hate it.” The most commonly disliked aspect was the building’s size. As one reader commented, “A monolithic behemoth. Looms over the campus in a menacing manner. As time goes by, with landscaping and growth of trees, this quality may dissipate somewhat.”
And the opinions were on the whole — almost 66 percent — negative; the biggest single vote-getter was “I hate it.” The most commonly disliked aspect was the building’s size. As one reader commented, “A monolithic behemoth. Looms over the campus in a menacing manner. As time goes by, with landscaping and growth of trees, this quality may dissipate somewhat.”
I’ll be curious to see what the result will be if we repeat the survey in five years. Let’s meet then in this space and find out.
In the meantime, a selection of other readers’ comments:
“I know the college has a lot of money, but it looks cheaper than the other buildings and my guess is they didn’t want to spend the money to build something that would look like it belonged there. It looks like a short inner-city office building.”
“Kudos to Swarthmore for bringing these three departments together under one massive roof. It’s the culmination of years of thoughtful planning; everyone involved should be commended.”
“The new building certainly dominates the upper part of campus, but it matches the adjacent Science Center in style (inside and outside) rather closely. It still has a bit of an uninhabited feel to it, but it’s new, and that’s to be expected. I will definitely want to go back and look again once phase two is complete and students have had time to settle in. My one disappointment is that the garden just south of the building is now smaller and feels somewhat crowded, but it sounds like once construction is complete there will be some work done there to adjust.” —Eugenia Tietz-Sokolskaya (Swarthmore Class of ‘13)
“Grotesquely oversized relative to the other buildings on campus and the Quaker Meeting House.”
“I applaud the effort by the college to make their new construction environmentally sustainable, such as green roofs, etc., but why are all new buildings on campus these days just so ugly in exterior design? Just plain straight lines and squares is getting quite dull on the senses.” —Ron Ricchezza
“I watched it under construction and was appalled at the obstruction of the views of the beautiful campus. It’s a looming monstrosity, and not welcome.”
“My wife and I walk past Singer Hall every day and have been inside several times. We have enjoyed watching the construction. The workmen and the Skanska engineers are all very friendly and happy to answer our questions about what they are doing. The interior hallways are angled and wide in a way that makes it quite pleasant. It is a big improvement on what was available in my student days in the 1960s.” —Patton Steuber
“It’s out of scale with every campus building and has no human scale — and grim, gray, and cold inside. It’s hard to believe this is how the College wants to present its version of ‘sustainability’ and environmental sensitivity with enormous hard-to-heat-and-cool atrium spaces and high ceilings, rather than opting to salvage a bit more natural green. Very loud, with seven condensers on the highest point in the borough...There is a claim that it will include a cheery insular patio space when the second building is complete, but that doesn’t seem to be part of a coherent campus plan. Odd.”
“Hopefully will look better upon completion, with landscaping. Maybe better than housing those departments in two or three smaller buildings.”
Ben Yagoda is the Swarthmorean’s survey editor.
To complement our readers survey on Singer Hall, the Swarthmorean invited architect, University of Pennsylvania professor, and Swarthmore resident William W. Braham to weigh in as well. Here’s what he told us:
William W. Braham
Viewed as you approach from the Whittier parking lot, the new Maxine Hall Singer building at Swarthmore College is a big building, presenting a long gray wall, bent in thirds to reduce the appearance of massiveness. The entryway on that side is given visual heft by combining it with the high-bay engineering lab, adding some visual interest and bringing it up to the scale of the long façade. On its other sides, the building reduces its bulk by stepping back the upper floor, extending discrete sections to the east and west, and adding a two-story, glazed and louvered section of offices that is raised up on canted columns and becomes the primary face of the building across the court to Trotter Hall. This is the view the architects, Ballinger, show on their website. The louvered offices are pulled away from the main mass, creating an enclosed atrium within, allowing daylight to reach the labs at the heart of the building. The attention to daylighting is part of a suite of progressive techniques used to reduce the energy consumption of the building, and, though specific sustainability goals aren’t mentioned, it looks to be high-performance building.
Singer Hall entrance
All together it is a well-crafted building that is neatly fit into a campus of mostly smaller buildings. My one complaint, if it rises to that level, is the detailing of the stone veneer. Modern construction is inherently thin, built in layers to achieve levels of performance our stone-on-stone predecessors couldn’t even imagine. So the question for any architect is how the penetrations through those layers are handled. In Swarthmore College’s Alice Paul residence halls, by William Rawn, the stone veneer is turned back into the window openings, giving the appearance of much thicker stone wall. In the more recent Palmer, Pittenger, and Roberts apartments by Digsau, the thin metal frame of the window is extended well beyond the edge of the stone veneer, giving a similar feeling of depth, even though the inherent thinness of all the materials is not concealed. Singer Hall, by contrast, sets the frame of the windows just back from the stone veneer, leaving the thinness of the wall evident. The architects had to rely, instead, on a syncopation of window sizes to enliven the large north façade, and count on the depth and shadows of the louvers of the south face to give the building character.
The material palette of the building is dependably Quaker, still expressing, after all these years, the ethic of plain dress. As Quaker historian Thomas Hamm explains, “Ruffles and lace and other forms of ornamentation, as well as unnecessary cuffs and collars and lapels and buttons, were forbidden.” In architecture, plain dress was not only translated as a minimum of ornamentation, which is wholly sympathetic to architectural modernism, but to a preference for monochromatic materials, mostly gray. It is actually a very elegant palette, as eternally in fashion as the little black dress, and generations of buildings on the campus have observed this aspect of simplicity, even ones that let some ornament sneak into the less visible places (looking at you Martin Biological Library). I was actually a bit shocked to see the colorful shading fins on the new Whittier Hall, painted in a rainbow of colors, and could only imagine that they wanted to get all the colors out there before anyone noticed.
William W. Braham
Swarthmore
