Society Hill Towers

Commerce had gone on around the Dock Street Market for over two hundred years when the area was torn down in 1959 to clear ground for the towers. The work belonged to the Washington Square East urban renewal project, launched in 1957 under Edmund Bacon, director of the city planning commission. Within it, a competition was won by Pei's firm, working with the developer Webb & Knapp. The towers were drawn up in 1957-1958 and finished in 1964; by 1977 other commercial buildings and landscaped parks had taken up the rest of the land cleared for the project.

The towers drew hundreds of newcomers to Philadelphia, but those who had lived or worked in the buildings pulled down for them had to leave. Across the neighborhood, renewal held middle-class families back from moving to the suburbs, while pushing out many low-income and minority renters.

For this project Pei received an American Institute of Architects Honor Award in 1965, and the Museum of Modern Art included the towers that year in its exhibition "Modern Architecture, USA".

The three towers are of cast-in-place, load-bearing concrete, and the gridded facade recalls a waffle iron. Floor-to-ceiling windows with aluminium frames are set deep into this concrete screen. The towers stand on an artificial hill that hides the parking garage. They are arranged asymmetrically: their sightlines line up with streets and frame views of neighboring sites, in the way traditional Chinese buildings frame views of their gardens.

Pei also designed thirty-seven three-story townhouses in Flemish bond brick, and provided trees, shrubs and lawns. A fountain and a lawn lead into these modernist townhouses, which stand alongside more than three hundred restored eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses of the neighborhood. A sculpture by Leonard Baskin stands near the fountain, and Gaston Lachaise's Floating Figure among the townhouses.

The three towers offered 720 apartments, aimed at middle-class households. Filling every unit took several years; later the towers became condominiums, which today number 614 units.

These apartment buildings are among the most visible landmarks of the area: they can be seen, for instance, from Second Street near the Head House pavilion. The sculptures on the site are public artworks; from Society Hill, shaded pedestrian greenways lead to Independence Hall.