Innovations in Instruction: Anchor Institution Seminar

The Humanities+Urbanism+Design (H+U+D) Initiative, on which Penn IUR is a partner, cultivates collaboration among students and community institutions through its Anchor Institution Seminar, a mixed undergraduate-graduate course that each spring examines the activities of a Philadelphia institution that reflects and serves the city’s diverse population. This innovative seminar offers students the opportunity to work with collections, exhibition planning, public programming, and architectural design in partnership with colleagues at the Anchor Institution.

This spring, students across various fields worked with Taller Puertorriqueño to learn about community, spacemaking, and memorialization in the built environment through “The Inclusive City: Participatory Design at Taller Puertorriqueño.” Taller Puertorriqueño is a community-based cultural organization whose primary purpose is to preserve, develop, and promote Puerto Rican and Latinx arts and culture in the City of Philadelphia.

Daniel Morales-Armstrong, William Fontaine Fellow of Africana Studies and History in the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS), taught the course in partnership with Taller’s Executive Director Carmen Febo-San Miguel and its Exhibitions Program Manager Rafael Damast. “The students developed methodological skills—they mapped neighborhoods, worked with primary sources, and participated in a community charette,” says Morales-Armstrong. “At the same time, they collaborated with a community on that community’s goals, learning essential soft skills and getting invaluable real-world experience.”

The Spring 2021 seminar centered on the Fairhill neighborhood, where students learned first-hand about the North Philadelphia Puerto Rican community’s efforts to tell its own history through the built environment. As participants in a truly interdisciplinary class, students utilized design concepts, historical methods, and ethnoracial lenses of analysis.

Drawing on these theoretical and methodological approaches, and community-informed site visits, the students designed and facilitated a community charrette at Taller Puertorriqueño to support its Memorializing Fairhill project. The charrette focused community participants’ design energies on two of the project’s goals: crafting site-specific histories in several permanent sculptural markers and a corresponding neighborhood map at Taller Puertorriqueño. Both products are intended to engage new audiences in community-based settings and deepen community engagement with the neighborhood’s history and urban geography. Aligned with the Memorializing Fairhill goal of generating an archive of material related to the project, the students co-wrote and self-published a short book for Taller Puertorriqueño’s archives, centered on an analysis of the charrette and its outcomes.

The seminar’s focus on making a local impact, engaging with diverse communities, and promoting innovative partnerships reflects the University’s values as outlined in the Penn Compact 2022, says Andrea Goulet, Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Department of Romance Languages, SAS, who serves as H+U+D Co-Director with Eugénie Birch, Co-Director, Penn IUR and Lawrence C. Nussdorf Professor of Urban Research, Department of City and Regional Planning, Stuart Weitzman School of Design.

Previous anchor institution seminars include “The Eastern State Penitentiary,” taught in Spring 2019 by Professor David B. Brownlee (History of Art), and “Archiving Jazz: Visuality and Materiality in the Philadelphia Jazz Community 1945-2019,” taught by Professor Herman Beavers in collaboration with the African American Museum of Philadelphia in Spring 2020.

Next year’s Anchor Institution seminar will be taught by David Barnes, Associate Professor, History and Sociology of Science, School of Arts and Sciences. The Spring 2022 seminar will focus on the Philadelphia Lazaretto, a building in Delaware County that served as the first quarantine hospital in the United States and is currently under active restoration through historical preservation efforts designed to open the site to public activities.  Professor Barnes’s work on the stories of immigration, hope, and disease control in the 19th century will bring the Lazaretto to life for students in today’s age of pandemic quarantine.

The H+U+D Initiative bridges the humanities and design disciplines to promote the integrated investigation of 21st century urbanism and architecture Penn. The project was launched by a generous award from the Andrew Mellon Foundation in 2013, which was renewed in 2018. The renewed grant is specifically devoted to “The Inclusive City” and has twin objectives: to stimulate inter- and multi- disciplinary work on diversity and inclusion in the built environment and to build an increasingly diverse and inclusive community of scholars who do this work.

For more information on the initiative, visit the H+U+D Initiative’s website.