Event Category: Fall Speaker Series

In the 2000s and 2010s, Hyman Myers and Bruce Laverty began to record oral history interviews with senior design professionals who lived or worked in the Greater Philadelphia region. Myers was then nearing retirement from the VITETTA Group and UPenn’s Architecture Department. Laverty was the Gladys Brooks Curator of Architecture at The Athenaeum of Philadelphia.

We have more than enough buildings. Instead of wasting natural resources we cannot replenish and polluting our environment even further with new construction, we should reuse, rethink, and reimagine what we already have. We should do such in a manner that opens up existing structures for all of us and allows us to understand where

The preservation movement has done more to determine the shape of American cities than nearly anything else in the last half century. But it is increasingly contributing to a crippling inertia, focusing too narrowly on bricks and mortar, divorcing itself from a broad public that has other priorities and needs–other things it wishes to preserve.

This presentation explores the enduring presence and living traditions of the Lenape people, emphasizing the deep cultural connections that have withstood centuries of displacement, disruption, and change. Highlighting stories of survival, adaptation, and revitalization, it traces the continuity of Lenape language, ceremonies, values, and community ties from ancestral homelands in the East to present-day Lenape

presented by Inga Saffron Philadelphia, like other big American cities, was once home to dozens of print newspapers. These papers exhibited a strong pack mentality (much like journalists themselves), and set up their offices in close proximity to one another, often on the same block, forming distinct media enclaves or newspaper rows. Other industries –

presented by David Brownlee, Ph.D., FSAH Horace Trumbauer of Philadelphia was the most enigmatic architect of America’s “Gilded Age.” Although he left school when he was 14, by the time he was thirty, he had built palatial homes for some of the nation’s wealthiest families, and his office would produce more than 800 designs over

presented by Jeffrey A. Cohen In the late 1880s, two serial entrepreneurs took on the unexpected project of making a visual record of Philadelphia’s suburban homes. In the abstract that would be no small task, the pair, Joseph Lewis Wells and John Ferguson Hope, commissioned large photographs of houses of individualized and venturesome design, most of

Former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter will moderate a panel discussion with the leaders of three Black heritage sites, the Marian Anderson, Henry Ossawa Tanner and Paul Robeson houses, which are each in the midst of renovations to both their physical spaces and their programmatic activities. All proceeds from this panel discussion will be donated to

presented by Supreme Dow and Tuomi Forrest. More details coming soon!

The roadway we now know as Frankford Avenue had its origins as a Lenape Indian trail. However, the English were not the first Europeans to settle in what is now Frankford, with the Swedes having earlier set up mills along the creek.  English colonization, led by the Quakers, eventually resulted in the Lenape Indian trail