Eighty-two truckloads of timber have been used in the Amy Gutmann Hall, Philadelphia’s newest and largest mass timber building, with the cross-laminated timber-framed campus becoming the new hub for the University of Pennsylvania’s AI and data research.
Part of a rapidly rising number of mass timber buildings across the Northeast, the six-storey, 116,000-square-foot building, now fully operational, was last year dedicated by past and present administrators, including Interim Penn President Larry Jameson, former Penn President Amy Gutmann, and Engineering Dean Vijay Kumar. It features three levels of teaching labs, a two-level main entrance (including a 12,000-square-foot green wall – designed to minimise the urban heat effect), and a whole floor dedicated to artificial intelligence research.
Designed by Texas-based Lake Flato Architects and KSS Architects, the project first broke ground in October 2021 and uses a hybrid cross-laminated timber system that helps reduce the structure’s overall carbon footprint by more than 52% relative to concrete and 41% relative to steel, as per KSS Architects’ original design statement.
“The building is not so much built as it is engineered and then prefabricated with extraordinary precision,” according to Liz Magill, who controversially resigned as Penn president in 2023, and spoke at the building’s dedication. Magill said the use of mass timber heavily relied on advanced computation and data, “precisely the kind of work that this building will foster when completed.”
The use of timber reduces a building’s embodied carbon by an estimated 55-70% and cuts down construction time by 40%
Penn Dean of Engineering Vijay Kumar celebrating the six-storey mass timber building which is now the Northeast’s tallest mass timber tower
According to Kumar new building will house scientific discovery, computer vision, natural language processing, cybersecurity, medical diagnostics, drug discovery, and intelligence systems: “I think you all know there are essentially limitless applications of data science and artificial intelligence, and what we want is near universal access to these tools,” Jameson said. “Where access and application come together, there’s synergy and power. This is where the world needs Penn.”
The building is dedicated to Gutmann for her “indelible impact on the Penn community” and trailblazing career in higher education and politics. Kumar called Gutmann’s 18-year tenure as Penn president — the longest ever — “an era of unprecedented growth and achievement across the university.”
“This building’s purpose is forward-looking, and it’s forward-looking in a collaborative sense, in bringing people who have different expertise, different visions of the future together to make a positive difference for the good of our society,” Gutmann said to attendees. “I’m humbled that this building bears my name, or at least the name of a person who has the same name as I do.”
- Click here to discover why mass timber construction could grow 25-fold across the United States over the next 50 years.
