Golkin Hall Project Blog

Finishes are a technical term for the final interior surfaces in architecture; materials like wood, stone, ceramic tile, stainless steel, carpet, and paint. Some are left in their raw state while others are treated such as a protective stain over wood or mechanically polishing a natural stone.  Finishes may be bold, subtle or understated but as the final, and most outwardly visible aspects of design they contribute to set the atmosphere and feeling of a space. Care and craftsmanship are found throughout in a good building but the finishes are where these qualities are most easily seen and appreciated.

 

There are two distinct finishes inside Golkin Hall that line the floors, walls, and ceilings: a limestone from Israel and a wood from the US. Ramon Gray limestone is a dolomitic limestone that is quarried around Jerusalem and other parts of Israel (see photo) and is recognized as the hardest and most abrasive resistant limestone available. Limestone is a sedimentary rock composed largely from grains that remain from skeletal fragments of marine organisms, so look closely for coral shells as you experience Golkin’s 4,000 square feet of limestone covered hallways (see photo)! 

  

 

 

The majority of the 3,750 square feet of wood walls, ceilings, doors, bookcases, and trim are American White Oak (see photo). The process of selecting the wood began in February 2011 with members from the Design Team, the Law School, and Penn traveling to the heart of Indiana. The first stop was a veneer plant to select the flitches (8 foot strips of wood cut directly off the tree) that varied based on tree species and grain (see video).  One in particular, an American White Oak, caught our eye, a veneer that included a pattern of flecks, or organic abnormalities in the grain that appeared iridescent in light (see photo).  Our job was done! Next we went to the laminator who takes the flitches and glues them onto 4” X 8’ panels then ships them to be cut into panels and finished (see video). 

 

 

 

 

 

This “behind-the-scenes” glimpse into two of Golkin Hall’s more prominent interior finishes concludes with their “in situ” installation and as Greg Burchard, KVA on-site architect, points out, “it’s a logistical challenge.” Hundreds of hours are spent prior to the installation, prepping and verifying the various field conditions. In the case of the wood paneling, each piece must be acclimated to the building interior since fluctuations in building temperature and humidity can cause panels to warp or veneers to delaminate! 

 

Our hope for the interior of Golkin Hall was to create a sense of welcoming and warmth through the use of natural and enduring materials. “We provided” says Veit Kugel, KVA design architect, “materials whose color is integral to the material itself and only changes with the passage of time, be it by day, night, years, and decades.” As the last of Golkin Hall’s finishes are put in place and the building is complete, a new journey is about to begin by a generation of students, faculty, and administrators who will in time leave their own impression on Golkin Hall and the Penn Law Campus.  Finishes bring us into the future.

 

 

On Monday morning, January 9, 2012, Golkin Hall opened its doors to welcome students and faculty returning to Penn Law for the spring semester.

 

We had many goals for Golkin Hall when we first dreamed of it: it would create spaces for collaboration; build classrooms and offices that support learning and research; speak to our existing beautiful buildings and to our urban landscape; respect our important Courtyard. But on Monday morning, one goal stood out for me: the goal of creating a lobby, an entrance point to the Law School, that gives those who enter the experience of having arrived at an important place.

 

Clearly, the Golkin Hall lobby achieves this goal. With its soaring windows and American oak feature wall, the lobby welcomes and invites those who enter to be creative, to reconsider, to inspire and to aspire, to create and to build…

 

The craftsmen and women building Golkin continue their work – we have many milestones ahead before we are fully occupying and best using the space. But entering into the Golkin Hall lobby is experiential. You are not just entering a space, you are arriving at a place that calls for your contribution. Let us know about your experience as you enter! 

 

 

If you’ve ever moved, you know that there is nothing worse than books. A box full of books can weigh more than an elephant. Schools, naturally, contain thousands upon thousands of books: hundreds of elephants worth of books. What students see in the library and in faculty offices is only the tip of the iceberg (or elephant, to spare you all the mixed metaphor). Behind the scenes, there are countless more documents and binders and papers and filing cabinets. In some cases there are rooms full of documents, and in some especially harrowing cases there are whole floors dedicated to nothing but the storage of tattered binders and huge steel filing cabinets full of data from the days of yore. 

 

One would think that such documents would only exist somewhere in the nebulous netherworld of cyberspace- ghosts in .pdf form. Given the current state of technology, there should not be hundreds of pounds of documents to move into the new building.  But, much to my dismay, electronic document storage is not always and everywhere the norm for very, very old files. Imagine my chagrin when I discovered that the .pdf file extension did not exist in-gasp!-1974! 

 

The hundreds of thousands of pages worth of documents nestled deep in the bowels of Silverman Hall had to be converted to electronic form at some point. The move to Golkin gives us a convenient excuse to finally make the conversion.   It only seems appropriate to undertake a major housecleaning at the start of a new year! 

Most mornings, I walk into the law school through the Chestnut Street entrance and head through the Haaga Lounge to get to my office in Silverman Hall. One of my favorite views on this walk is that of the Goat, perched in his nook in the Haaga lounge. His new home makes it seem as if he looks out the large windows of the lounge, surveying all of the school as any mascot should. It is the perfect place for the Goat, as he serves as the symbol of Penn Law to so many.

 

In my role at the law school, I enjoy getting to meet the law school’s alumni and listening to their stories about their days here. Of course they all have an affinity for the Goat, but I also hear many other tales about good times at the law school, too.  I find myself experiencing the physical landscape of Penn Law through the eyes of its graduates. Each space in the existing buildings, here, holds a myriad of tales from decades-worth of students. Those stories are always in the back of my mind every time I walk through the halls.

 

Fond memories undoubtedly inspired the alumni who generously donated to the fund that has built Golkin Hall. Between the roof-top gardens, the re-formed courtyard, the auditorium, the moot court room, the student union space, and the new Haaga Lounge, the new building offers so many places for new memories to be made. But what most excites me is the fact that this new space yields both the opportunity to experience a part of Penn Law purely from my own perspective and the chance to hear new stories from the alumni who will see Golkin Hall, as students and returning graduates.   

 

Now that the entrance on Sansom Street is coming together, I am able to envision my new route from the front door to my department’s new suite on the top floor of Golkin Hall.  I anticipate more than a few lunch hours in the rooftop garden and a slew of spectacular events throughout the building. In just a few short weeks, the Goat will have one more “wing” to oversee and our students, staff, and alumni will have a new place in which to  build memories. How exciting!

In classic films, the leading actress or actor knows how to make an entry. In these movies, the director often calls upon the architecture of stairs, doors, thresholds or balconies to stage and frame this cinematic moment of great suspense and high drama.  Outside the realm of cinema, the design of architectural elements within the urban context of a city can mark entry and departure, moments that take place in daily life. 

 

Outside Golkin Hall, today you can see the steel column structure, brackets, and clips that are the armature of what will soon be the Imasogie Entry Wall. The team at KVA is eagerly waiting for the stone cladding to begin! In making the Imasogie Entry Wall, we have drawn design inspiration from three sources: the urban ‘stage’ of Sansom Street, the impressive depth of the historic stone masonry of Silverman Hall, and the play of sun light.

 

Sansom Street has an intimate urban scale. We want to engage the relatively narrow dimensions of Sansom Street and utilize the dimensions of this urban ‘stage’ to the greatest advantage in making visible the entry to Golkin Hall. In the approach from 34^th St and 36^th St, the long diagonal views will be ‘caught’ by the form of the Imasogie Entry Wall, which creates a space of threshold and transition from the secular world of Sansom Street to the halls of the Law School and the green Courtyard beyond. The building envelope of Silverman Hall is almost three feet thick, and the building’s strong street presence is emphasized by its limestone masonry. In making an entry, we want to create both texture and depth with marble, using contemporary design and construction techniques to establish an entry condition that will reflect the stature of Penn Law. The design uses sixty panels of 1 ¼” inch thick American Danby Vermont Marble, which are paired to form V shaped ‘books’ of marble. The stone cladding will be hung and clipped onto the steel structure in the coming weeks. The pairs of marble panels are designed to be hung at very precise angles creating a transition from a uniform marble surface at the top to an expression of individual stone strands. This will create the depth and presence of the Imasogie Entry Wall, which is reflected by a similar rotation of wood White Oak panels inside the Entry Lobby. The stately, solid yet delicate and curtain-like qualities of the marble cladding will be rendered dynamic from morning to afternoon thanks to the movement of the sun. After much design and simulation studies, we are excited to finally see how the east and west sunlight will play with the marble cladding, allowing each member of the Law School community to make an entry into Golkin Hall or onto Samson Street and experience the Imasogie Entry Wall in a new light.