Krishna P. Singh Center For Nanotechnology
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Krishna P. Singh Center For Nanotechnology

Weiss/Manfredi

Krishna P. Singh Center For Nanotechnology
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The newly-opened Krishna P. Singh Center for Nanotechnology demonstrates the University of Pennsylvania’s leadership in the emerging field of nanotechnology. Nanoscale research is at the core of cutting-edge breakthroughs that transcend disciplinary boundaries of engineering, medicine, and the sciences. The new Center for Nanotechnology contains a rigorous collection of advanced labs, woven together by collaborative public spaces that enable interaction between different fields.
The University’s first cross disciplinary building, the Singh Center encourages the exchange and integration of knowledge that characterizes the study of this emerging field and combines the resources of both engineering and the sciences.
Both the University and Philadelphia have a tradition of organizing buildings around open quads. While laboratory buildings are typically organized around a central corridor that affords little public space, the Center for Nanotechnology inverts this model, focusing the laboratories around a new central quad. This convergence of architecture and landscape at the heart of this project provides a new indoor/outdoor open space for interaction, allowing panoramic exterior views, opening the sciences to the University landscape, and making research activities highly visible. A public galleria is situated between the lab and exterior enclosure to function as an inhabitable lens. The separation of interior and exterior space becomes blurred through the use of frit patterns and mirrored effects in the glowing galleria. The potential dialogue that is created by weaving vibrant public spaces for research and interaction with intensive lab spaces for hands-on production is at the core of the Singh Center’s design. The public galleria at the building’s entry is centralized around a monumental stair, highly visible to draw students through the double height space. The stair hosts flexible lounges to encourage work and collaboration to happen throughout the building. The spatial sequence spirals upwards around the galleria and unfurls around the courtyard to culminate with a multipurpose forum—a room contained within the building’s cantilever for lectures, receptions, and meetings, cantilevering sixty-eight feet over the courtyard below and offering a perch for taking in the view toward the historic core of Penn’s campus. Defined by a 1.7 acre central campus green at a new gateway to the campus, the Singh Center ascends as a spiral of research, reaching its highest elevation at the forum, opening to views of both the city and campus.

Weiss/Manfredi is a multidisciplinary design firm in New York known for the dynamic integration of architecture, art, infrastructure, and landscape design. Weiss/Manfredi believes architecture has the capacity to connect art, design, and ecology to reinvigorate cities, create sustainable environments, and recast the infrastructural identity of cultural institutions. The firm’s interdisciplinary approach is exemplified in work that weaves the loose ends of architecture and landscape to create socially vibrant and ecologically resilient public destinations. Recent award-winning projects include the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park, the University of Pennsylvania Center for Nanotechnology, the Barnard College Diana Center, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center, and the Sylvan Theater at the National Mall.
The firm has won numerous awards and competitions and has been featured in exhibitions at The Museum of Modem Art, the Venice Architectural Biennale, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the National Building Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Louvre.

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