Welcome Back From the President |
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Making Connections
The walk from the President’s house to my College Hall office takes me across a vital connecting link for our campus: the Class of 1949 Generational Bridge, a 160-foot extension of Locust Walk built in 1970. This summer it was necessary to detour down Walnut Street while the bridge was closed for resurfacing and refurbishment. As is so often the case, it is not until a connection of this kind goes missing that you appreciate just how important it is! The Generational Bridge and Locust Walk are now better than new, and our campus more conducive than ever to those serendipitous outdoor connections that create a truly vibrant academic community.
While rebridging the west end of our campus, we also began building new bridges of a different sort at the easternmost end of Penn. Just days prior to Commencement in May, hundreds of community and business leaders joined together in breaking ground on a game-changing construction project at our eastern gateway on Walnut Street. The FMC Tower will soar 49 stories tall, replacing a barren landscape with a shimmering spire of glass overlooking Penn Park and the Schuylkill River. The Tower represents the final phase in the collaborative redevelopment by Penn, Brandywine Realty Trust and FMC of what was formerly US Postal Service land. The landmark building will house an impressive range of business, retail and residential amenities, with Penn occupying 100,000 square feet of office space.
The FMC Tower shines a bright light on the fact that University City is now one of Philadelphia’s fastest growing and most vital centers of development. Penn has led the way in reinventing this eastern gateway linking West Philadelphia and Center City. We began with two uniquely transformative projects: Penn Park, greening the easternmost entrance to our campus, rapidly followed by our new Singh Center for Nanotechnology, which adds cutting-edge technological innovation to our city to transform everything from energy production to healthcare delivery. The FMC Tower is the capstone of our easternmost connection with Center City. Together, these moves maximize Penn’s impact on our city, on our society and the world for many decades to come.
A fourth major move, this one right across the river to our east, complements and strengthens Penn’s strategic investments in West Philadelphia. We call this site South Bank: It is the former Grays Ferry parcel of land we purchased in 2010. Thanks to the entrepreneurial and innovative genius of Penn faculty, we have already made this 23-acre site home to new technology ventures ranging from flying robots to green vaccines. South Bank enables us to maximize our impact on the world through commercializing faculty research into new products, services and entrepreneurial ventures.
To further that end, in June we announced the launch of the Penn Center for Innovation (PCI), an initiative that will provide the infrastructure, leadership and resources needed to transfer promising Penn know-how into the marketplace. PCI is an organization created to maximize our mission as a research university for putting knowledge into practice for the good of our community and society. Pennovation is the term we coined to signal our ability to advance both basic discovery and the society-improving applications those discoveries enable.
This fall, we will take a major step in translating that abstract term into concrete practice when we celebrate the groundbreaking for the Pennovation Center at South Bank, a facility designed to be a business incubator and accelerator. The Pennovation Center will support an ecosystem of faculty, entrepreneurs, and companies working together to make innovative contributions to our collective economic future.
I invite you to join us at South Bank on October 31 for a daylong series of events featuring the contributions of Penn’s eminent faculty capped by a keynote discussion with the biographer of geniuses, Walter Isaacson, for our 2014 David and Lyn Silfen University Forum, “From Idea to Innovation: The Impactful University.” Isaacson wrote the best-selling biography Steve Jobs and also authored one of the most readable and insightful biographies of our founder, aptly titled Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. This fall will see the publication of Isaacson’s eagerly awaited next book, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Age, which explores the surprisingly long history of the digital revolution including how the first electronic general-purpose computer, ENIAC, was constructed here at Penn. He will be the perfect guest to help us explore the lineage from Franklin our founder, to ENIAC, to Pennovation and the countless creative discoveries that connect every member of the Penn community in such a positive and productive way to our community, society and world.
—Amy Gutmann |
