Society Hill Towers
- Architect
- I. M. Pei
- Year
- 1964
- Style
- Brutalism
- City
- Philadelphia, PA
Society Hill Towers is a three-building, 624-unit complex on a 5-acre Society Hill site, designed by I. M. Pei and Associates and completed in 1964 as cast-in-place concrete towers with floor-to-ceiling windows. It was the centerpiece of a late-1950s urban renewal push, when the Philadelphia City Planning Commission and Redevelopment Authority targeted Society Hill, then considered a slum, buying up 31 acres around Dock Street and demolishing the Dock Street Market to clear the towers' site. The apartments opened as rentals and converted to condominiums in 1979.
the building
Three towers, one plan. The complex is three separate 31-story skyscrapers holding 624 units between them, spread across a 5-acre site, a scale and repetition typical of Pei's urban renewal-era towers.
Concrete and glass. The towers are built of cast-in-place concrete, with every apartment given floor-to-ceiling windows, pairing raw structural material with maximum transparency.
Clearing the slum. From 1957 to 1959 the Greater Philadelphia Movement, the Redevelopment Authority, and the Old Philadelphia Development Corporation bought 31 acres around Dock Street, relocating and demolishing the Dock Street Market to assemble the 5-acre parcel the towers now sit on.
the style
The towers are Brutalist, built of cast-in-place concrete left as the finished surface, the style's signature honesty about structure and material, deployed here at full skyscraper scale rather than in a civic building.
More on Brutalismthe architect
I. M. Pei designed Society Hill Towers through his firm I. M. Pei and Associates. Edmund Bacon, executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, awarded the redevelopment competition to the developer-architect firm Webb and Knapp in 1957, the arrangement under which Pei's firm took on the project.
significance
Completed in 1964 as rental apartments, the towers converted to condominiums in 1979. They stand as the built result of one of Philadelphia's defining urban renewal campaigns, replacing what city planners had designated a slum neighborhood around the old Dock Street Market.
nearby
- Powel House
- Merchants' Exchange Building
- New Market and Head House
- United States Custom House
- First Bank of the United States
- Carpenters' Hall