University of Pennsylvania Amy Gutmann Hall

Amy Gutmann Hall is Penn Engineering’s new home for data science and AI. At six stories and 116,000 square feet, the building is the tallest mass timber academic facility on the East Coast. Named for the university’s longest-serving president, Amy Gutmann Hall connects building occupants, who work in a digital realm, back to the natural world—maximizing views and daylight, integrating ecological environments into interior spaces, and incorporating sensory stimuli that encourage collaboration and comfort. The cutting-edge mass timber system significantly reduces the building’s carbon footprint and reinforces its identity as a beacon of innovation.

In collaboration with KSS Architects.

Housing Penn Engineering’s data science research and academic programs, Amy Gutmann Hall is a vibrant and welcoming hub for cross-disciplinary collaborations focused on harnessing the power of data and AI. The facility houses three floors of teaching labs, active learning classrooms, and collaboration spaces as well as three floors of research centers. The ground floor serves as a home base for data science and AI programming with a gracious student commons and a quiet reading room, collaboration spaces, and a large lecture hall.

At Penn, our spaces show our values to the world. The very construction of Amy Gutmann Hall embodies Penn’s values and commitment to sustainability and wellness. Its novel construction using mass timber, a sustainable, yet remarkably resilient material, sets it apart from any before it at Penn or in the City of Philadelphia. Inside the building, the warmth of the exposed wood creates a welcoming environment for our community, inspiring us to even greater levels of creativity and imagination. Vijay Kumar

Nemirovsky Family Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science

The building’s sustainable design features include a high-performance envelope, which reduces the building’s energy consumption by nearly 20%. Low-flow plumbing fixtures reduce indoor water usage by 33%. High-performance windows and skylights provide balanced daylighting, with more than 77% of regularly occupied spaces offering views to nature. The frit pattern on the curtain wall, designed in collaboration with Andrew Kudless of Matsys, marries biomorphic patterns with computational design, further reinforcing the building’s identity.

Creating Community

A New Space Model for Data Science & AI

Unlike labs designed for an individual researcher or research team, the labs at Amy Gutmann Hall are designed for broader community benefit. For this project, the evolving nature of collaboration, disruption, and research in the fields of data science and AI necessitated a building layout that could evolve over time while also accommodating specialized research and workflows. The result is a new space model that specifically supports data science students and AI research communities while creating a sense of community and broad ownership of the building.

Creating Community

Next-Gen Research Neighborhoods

Traditional computational labs typically house a single team of 6-8 researchers in a layout that includes workstations and social spaces. This configuration leads to cellular buildings that struggle to foster community. Amy Gutmann Hall features research labs that can support 4-5 research teams resulting in 32-40 researchers within a single open lab space. Zoom rooms and enclosed collaboration spaces located just outside the labs feature glass walls for acoustic separation while maintaining visual connectivity. These re-imagined research neighborhoods are flexible and collaborative, resulting in an interdisciplinary and vibrant research community.

Creating Community

Expanding Access & Engagement

Amy Gutmann Hall centralizes resources that advance the work of scholars across a wide variety of fields, making the tools and concepts of data analysis and AI more accessible to the Penn community. Connecting students and researchers on the third floor, the Data Science Hub encourages researchers from across campus and the private sector to gather through programs and events. Local community outreach and educational programs also occur here, with the goal of increasing access to computer science instruction and addressing inequities in STEM.

The upper three floors are organized into large, flexible “neighborhoods” of 35-40 researchers, each linked to adjacent labs through shared collaboration zones. Small, open kitchenettes are strategically positioned throughout the research zones to bring researchers together for informal, serendipitous conversations that foster community and support a shared sense of vibrancy and innovation. A larger kitchen and break room, located on the fifth floor, serve the entire research community and host community events.

For some, the terms data science and artificial intelligence conjure images of people focused on computer screens and manipulating lines of code, but for [Amy Gutmann Hall], the architects Lake Flato with KSS envisioned an environment where people would instead engage with each other. Joann Gonchar

Architectural Record

Early & Integrated Mass Timber Procurement

To control costs and minimize risk, Lake Flato advocated for the early engagement and procurement of mass timber, MEP, fireproofing, and curtainwall contracts. In close collaboration with Gilbane Construction, Lake Flato designed the early procurement process, subcontractor selection, and systems integration. The increased clarity and integration created by this innovative approach contributed to the project coming in three months early and $500,000 under budget.