Alfred Newton Richards Medical Research Laboratories and David Goddard Laboratories Buildings National Register of Historic Places Listing

Louis Kahn changed architecture here. In the late 1950s, the University of Pennsylvania needed new medical labs, so they hired Kahn, a local professor who hadn't yet achieved global fame. He delivered a cluster of soaring red-brick and concrete towers that completely rejected the slick, sterile glass boxes of the era. Walk up to the Richards and Goddard complex today and you see clear divisions. Kahn separated the "served" spaces-the actual research labs-from the "servant" spaces, which housed the elevators, stairs, and massive exhaust ducts. He used precast concrete trusses engineered by August Komendant. They fit together like a giant puzzle. No hidden pipes. No fake ceilings, just raw structural honesty.

But the building had a secret. It was a terrible place to actually do science. Kahn wanted open, communal work zones filled with natural light, but researchers hated the glare. They taped aluminum foil and cheap cardboard over the massive plate-glass windows to keep their specimens from melting. Fumes wafted everywhere. The lack of privacy drove introverted biologists crazy. Still, the architectural world went wild. The Museum of Modern Art ran a solo exhibition dedicated just to this design before construction even finished. It proved that modernism could have weight, history, and monumental soul.

Penn eventually spent tens of millions of dollars to fix the interior mess. They replaced the old single-pane glass, overhauled the HVAC, and partitioned the spaces to make them usable for modern computer-driven medicine. This massive upgrade saved the structure from becoming a useless relic. In 2009, it became a National Historic Landmark. Today, the brick towers stand as a monument to Kahn's stubborn genius, even if his vision originally required a lot of foil to work.