The Lighting Practice Illuminates Schuylkill Yards Life Sciences Complex

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The City of Philadelphia, known as an East Coast hub for “eds and meds”, continues to grow and attract innovative life sciences companies. As a result, buildings that support research and development have become a necessity in the City. The Lighting Practice is working closely with multiple architects designing life sciences facilities at West Philadelphia’s Schuylkill Yards. The new facilities, housing primarily laboratories and research spaces, will take on a variety of shapes from high-rise towers to shorter, horizontal buildings bordering the treelined central green. The developer, Brandywine Realty Trust, strives to differentiate Schuylkill Yards from its neighbor, the uCity Square life sciences development, by offering distinctive architecture and generous public spaces.

The Lighting Practice is on the design team for the following Schuylkill Yards projects:

  • 3000 Market Street, Spark Therapeutics
    Architect: CRB
  • 3151 Market Street
    Architect: Gensler
  • Bulletin Building, Spark Therapeutics
    Architect: Jacobs

Don’t count out office buildings yet. Philly developers push ahead with new, pandemic-resistant designs.

The Philadelphia Inquirer | 17 November 2020 | Inga Saffron

The Market Street office canyon in Center City was never a particularly lively place even before the pandemic, but these days it feels as inert as a scene in an Edward Hopper painting. Barely 30% of the people who used to work in those towers have been showing up to their desks, according to one building manager. The more time they spend working remotely from their kitchens and dens, the more it seems that the downtown corporate skyscraper is destined to become an architectural dinosaur.

Yet it’s much too early to declare the end of the office building. Undaunted by the upheavals of the last eight months, Philadelphia developers are moving ahead with three large commercial projects in the city.

Two of those buildings were in the works before the pandemic hit — a new law firm headquarters and a lab building at West Philadelphia’s uCity Square — so you might argue that the developers had little choice but to finish the job. But, on Tuesday, Brandywine Realty Trust will announce plans for a massive lab building at 31st and Market, suggesting that certain kinds of commercial projects still have a future.

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Rendering by Gensler