By Jessie Fetterling

PHILADELPHIA — The University of Pennsylvania (Penn) in Philadelphia held a grand opening event on Oct. 28 for its new 58,000-square-foot innovation lab, cleverly dubbed Pennovation Center. Previously owned by DuPont, the building was transformed into a combination of wet labs, co-working areas and social spaces. These key design elements were created to serve three purposes: to make the facility a catalyst for learning, an incubator for commerce and a beacon for the community.

The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia held a grand-opening event on Oct. 28 for its new 58,000-square-foot Pennovation Center.“This is a unique business and technology incubator where innovators’ ideas go to work,” said Anne Papageorge, vice president of Penn Facilities and Real Estate Services, in a statement. “The center is designed to bring together the university’s eminent researchers and students, along with the private sector, to foster creative exploration, entrepreneurship, new alliances and generate economic development for the region.”

New York-based Hollwich Kushner served as the project’s design architect, while locally based KSS Architects was the architect of record. The building’s angular facade reaches outward towards the Schuylkill River, with a plaza situated in the center that features a combination of fixed and moveable seating. With approximately 200 desks distributed throughout, the building’s interior also features several components that help encourage innovation: ample break spaces; wide, daylit hallways that double as program spaces; and flexible, moveable furnishings.

“Entrepreneurs thrive on invention,” said Matthias Hollwich of Hollwich Kushner in a statement. “That means a lot of dedicated time spent in labs hunched over workbenches and computers. We wanted to create a building that encouraged the innovators to get up from their desks, to pitch their ideas and socialize with their colleagues. That’s why we took all of the social action of the building and packed it into the spiky geometric façade.”

Since opening, 20 different companies and more than 150 individuals — researchers in pharmacology, medicine, robotics and environmental studies — have already taken up shop in the Pennovation Center. The first two floors of the building incorporate the co-working spaces, wet labs and shared amenities. The third floor is home to the Penn Engineering Research and Collaboration Hub (PERCH), designed to help the university create lab-to-market technologies that will transfer in areas such as robotics, the “Internet of things,” embedded systems and other emerging domains of interdisciplinary engineering.

PERCH is a space designed to encourage active learning, project-based learning and connected learning. For instance, students can collaborate on a larger-than-life robotic arm, a pet-sized robot that can jump and a GPS-robot hybrid technology that can navigate indoor spaces, according to a statement.

The Pennovation Center is this first phase of the larger-scale, 23-acre Pennovation Works development. The area was once a heavy industrial site that now supports the research and entrepreneurial mission of both university clients and third-party commercial tenants. Landscaping for the site will include stormwater management, increased connections between buildings and access to the Schuylkill River trails, according to the project website.