The hidden history behind a pair of former UArts buildings helps explain why they’re landmarks

The agonizing and abrupt closure of Philadelphia’s University of the Arts last year may yet yield something positive for those who care deeply about the city’s rich architectural legacy.

The university’s two oldest buildings have been acquired by Scout, a Philadelphia-based design and development firm, which promises to transform them into “a dynamic ecosystem of studios, small businesses, nonprofits, and artist residences.”

But before we rejoice, we need reassurance that Scout appreciates just what it has acquired. You cannot care for a great building unless you know why it is great.

Hamilton Hall and Furness Hall are nominally two buildings, but, in fact, are one long rambling structure. Hamilton Hall was designed by John Haviland in 1826 to house the Pennsylvania Institution for the Deaf and Dumb (today known as the School for the Deaf). Its original building at Broad and Pine Streets was gradually extended westward until 1875, when it reached 15th Street with Frank Furness’ eponymous Furness Hall.

The result is an amusing ensemble: a stern Greek Revival temple at the prow, trailed by a brick Gothic caboose to the rear. But its real importance is not at all in its style, or the celebrity architects who designed it, but in the beautiful expression of a simple idea: Deaf children learn through their eyes.

When Haviland built his Greek temple, it effectively stood in the countryside. But development soon reached Broad Street, and by the Civil War, it was engulfed by stores, churches, and rows of fashionable houses.

Dismayed by these changes, the directors of the School for the Deaf began to look at greener, cleaner sites in West Philadelphia. This would have happened but for the inspired collaboration of Furness, the architect, and William Welsh, head of the building committee.

The building is the beautiful expression of a simple idea: Deaf children learn through their eyes.

Welsh, a businessman and philanthropist, believed that a move to the countryside would deprive the school’s pupils of visual stimulus. They needed “the activities of city life and the infinite variety of ideas that are received through the sights in a large city.”

And what better viewing platform, he argued, than Broad Street, “one of the great thoroughfares of the city”? The argument for staying was unassailable, but it still did not solve the problem of the stale urban air. This is where Furness stepped in.

Furness surrounded his double row of dormitories with nine mighty ventilating stacks, which are invariably mistaken for chimneys. These were brick shafts, and in the center of each was a large iron pipe that was heated by a furnace below, and kept running all year round. This would warm the air, causing an updraft that would lift the exhausted air from the dorm rooms and expel it, even as it drew in cooler fresh air from outside.

Furness could have treated his ventilation stacks merely as utilitarian necessities, but instead, he chose to celebrate them. He pushed them to the outer walls, raised them above the roofline, and crowned them with massive projecting caps with festive iron cresting.

This announced that ventilation was not an architectural afterthought; they expressed the interplay of fire and air, which was the central truth of the building — a congenial thought for an architect whose own name was a pun on truth and fire.

But Furness did not stop here. Taking to heart Welsh’s idea that the education of deaf children is “through the eye alone,” he ran a continuous cast-iron balcony along the entire Broad Street front, a parapet from which to view the life of the street.

In effect, he turned Haviland’s building inside out, morphing his introspective Greek temple into an extroverted theater of the city. Alas, the balconies were removed after the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, the forerunner of the University of the Arts, took over the building in 1893. But one can still look at the granite foundations of the building and see where the iron brackets were mounted.

Is it too much to hope that Scout might restore the balconies? If not, what about the ventilation shafts, which have been decapitated over the years and are now blunt stumps?

While the building has been mutilated, the idea that a building might derive its visual character from its system of ventilation has lived on.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Company Administration Building in Buffalo became a sensation in 1904 by making its fire stairs and ventilating shafts the subject of its facade. Is it possible Wright got the idea from his mentor, Louis H. Sullivan, who, in turn, trained with Furness?

And Philadelphia architect Louis Kahn needed no intermediary to acquaint him with the work of Furness; it was all around him. His Richards Medical Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania startled the world when he wrapped its laboratories within a mantle of expressively projecting towers and shafts.

The good folks at Scout might be reminded what an architectural landmark has passed into their hands: A landmark that embodies, in a single building, two of the best aspects of Philadelphia culture — the humanitarian and the imaginative.

Michael J. Lewis is a professor of architecture at Williams College with an emphasis on buildings in Philadelphia. He is the author of “Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind” and “Philadelphia Builds: Essays on Architecture.”