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PHILAPHILIA Dead-Ass Proposal of the Week: Kimmel Cancer Center
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PHILAPHILIA Dead-Ass Proposal of the Week: Kimmel Cancer Center
A weekly series of foul-mouthed investigations into empty lots, dead-ass proposals and other design phenomena in Philadelphia. Find more stories like this at Philaphilia.blogspot.com.
1001 Locust St. -- Here's a Dead-Asser that illustrates how much things have changed in good ol' Philadelphia in the last 15 years. When this crazy motherfucker was proposed, it was considered a MAJOR building that would change the skyline forever. The largest building proposal for the city in a decade and the tallest construction project in Washington Square West in seven decades. Nowadays, this proposal would fall into the shuffle of approximately 130 projects now in some stage of development in the city.
In the 1990s, Jefferson was having some hurt feelings. UPenn's School of Medicine was kicking their asses in cancer research. Though Jeff just finished the 11-story Bluemle Building for the purposes of research, they only received one quarter of the National Institutes of Health grants Penn was getting. In 1996, self-made gazillionaire Sidney Kimmel donated $10 million for the purposes of getting some more cancer researching going. In response, Jeff re-named their cancer research facility the Kimmel Cancer Center.
In fall 1998, Jefferson announced that they would take this shit to the next level. They would create a consolidated research/clinical care facility so that the cancer could be cured both in theory AND in practice within the same building. This would all be housed in a brand new Jefferson facility, bigger and more impressive than any they had built before. The location was set for the 1000 block of Locust Street, where Jefferson was ready to demolish a shitbag 1960s-era parking garage.
On April 5, 2000, Jefferson came to the Zoning Board of Adjustment with a plan for a 20-story, 380,000-square-foot, $140 million building with a crazy design. Understanding the need to get away from the orange-bricked shitcastles Jeff littered the neighborhood with in the '60s, they commissioned the badass architects from the Chicago-based firm of Perkins & Will. They even got their principal architect, Ralph Johnson, to design the new structure.
This crazy motherfucker was going to be 225 feet tall, with two facades separated according to function. The brick section was to be the research side, the glass-walled section the treatment side. A long pitched roof would extend all the way across the building, tapering down along with the sides of the building, which themselves would taper to a point on the eastern side. The entire treatment side of the building would float over the ground, held up by a single pillar. What you can't see in the rendering above is that the ground under the floating section was to be a driveway and entrance to an underground garage. Sidney Kimmel promised an additional donation of $25 million to get the ball rolling on its construction.
Even though they got approval from the Washington West Civic Association (after a long dispute over the placement of the parking garage), they needed a zoning variance due the the extreme length of the building, which was to be 360 feet. This was six times the length that zoning would allow. The butt-fugly brutalist Alumni Hall across the street is already a block long, so the two buildings together would create a great chasm that would stay in shadow most of the day.
Before they could even get zoning approval, shit got all fucked up. Dr. Joseph Gonella, Dean of Jefferson, got pushed out of power by the Board of Trustees. Kimmel was so pissed off about it that he said, "fuck y'all," and withdrew his $25 million. Jefferson then announced that the project would be delayed for at least a year in order to raise more money and figure out their parking problems (which I don't understand, since the building itself was to have a 200-space garage).
After that year passed and then some, Jefferson was still making the same excuses. Eventually, they said "fuck this shit" and came up with an entirely different master plan for the whole campus in 2006. Most of that plan never came to be, but its design for a new building and plaza at the 1000 block of Locust did, and in a big way. By the end of 2007, the 1000 block became graced with a beautiful 60,000-square-foot green public space called Lubert Plaza and a new crescent-shaped structure called the Dorrance H. Hamilton Building. A 215-space parking garage sits underground.
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| Pictures from the Landscape Architecture Foundation |
Five years later, the new plaza has become a Rittenhouse Square Junior for the neighborhood. Covered in sunbathers in the summer, giant snowmen in the winter, and crowded as fuck at lunchtime all year round. Though the Kimmel Cancer Center was going to be a pretty cool-looking building, the plaza is way better. Good job.
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