"Smart City Challenge"

Philadelphia's Office of Innovation & Technology recently launched "Smart City Challenge," a website designed to field innovative ideas from residents and tech pros through a lengthly and legal-laden government .PDF, ultimately asking innovative geniuses to email their thoughts to the city's Deputy Chief Information Officer. 

If that doesn't sound very innovative to you, welcome to 1995. 

To say this effort is at the very least an earnest one is gracious. The "Challenge" was launched by the stagnant Office of Innovation & Technology after Mayor Kenney reconfigured it, pressuring its staff to innovate something. It's a little depressing that after years of employing allegedly innovative minds, the best the Office could come up with was outsourcing their jobs to the general public, along with an amateur website.

The Office has been nationally decried as a failure, its only notable product being the defunct Wireless Philadelphia, a citywide broadband initiative that neither Comcast nor Verizon wanted any part of. Wireless Philadelphia hired EarthLink, because that's where you go when Comcast and Verizon shut you off, and Wireless Philadelphia found itself a bit too reminiscent of AOL 4.0 for its users.

None of that says Innovation & Technology.

Despite all the press that the "Smart City Challenge" is receiving, it's really just proving how ineffectual the Office of Innovation & Technology actually is. And the minuscule research the media has done regarding the Office is indicative of a time when the same publications were lauding Wireless Philadelphia. In fact, PhillyMag.com didn't even bother to mention that "Smart City Challenge" was launched by the Office of Innovation & Technology, only that it's being overseen by Chief Administrative Officer Rebecca Rhynhart.

CAO Rhynhart wears a lot of hats, overseeing everything from Human Resources to Public Property. Innovation and city bureaucracies are notoriously at odds, so new technology will certainly take a backseat to anything else that comes across her desk.

There's no question the "Smart City Challenge" will field some great ideas, but good ideas for streamlining cities are made over cocktails at dive bars across the country all the time. The city will still have to do something with those ideas, and the Office of Innovation & Technology hasn't proven itself capable of producing anything innovative.

It's unfortunate, but even cities synonymous with technology - be it San Francisco or Seattle - are saddled with bureaucratic entities struggling to catch up, even in departments solely dedicated to innovation and technology. You can hire the best and the brightest to innovate your city, but if City Hall doesn't prioritize those efforts, a city becomes saddled with a bunch of high priced bodies pushing paper, and posting .PDF documents on a website that could have been made in Geocities. 

The truth is, Philadelphia can innovate, and it will. But it won't come from City Hall. It will come from the same places that made a name for other innovative hubs: universities, hospitals, and private technology companies. It will come from the Pennovation Center, Drexel's Schuylkill Yards, the Navy Yard, even Comcast. It won't filter into the city through an email that the Office of Innovation & Technology won't even bother to read. Like too many bureaucratic paper-pushers, those people are just trying to keep a cushy job doing as little as possible. It's going to come from places where innovation is the bottom line, and then - hopefully - spillover into the streets. 

It will come from places like this.

Penn's Perry World House

Universities are no stranger to experimental architecture. Academia has the money to burn and the connections to push anything through the approval process. From the College of William and Mary's sunken gardens to everything Drexel built in the 1960s to my first dorm we affectionately dubbed "Kibrini Green" (because that's what it looked like), colleges build things that leave lasting impressions...for better or worse.

Frazer Dorm

Modern architecture has a shelf life of about ten years, sometimes twenty. Erdy-McHenry's monolithic apartment blocks in University City and North Philadelphia may look funky, even kind of cool, now. But they're also foreboding and unfriendly fortresses. That won't age well. But if a building manages to weather a few decades of unpopularity, it eventually earns appreciation in retrospect. 

After all, Philadelphians spent decades demolishing the works of Frank Furness and Willis G. Hale to make way for "clean" glass curtains. City Hall spent some time in architectural detention. But today, people are even beginning to embrace midcentury Brutalism for its artistic uniqueness, however cold. We love retro. It just takes time to get there.

But there are some buildings that will never find their place. And more often than not, these places are the product of universities and governments with the cash to spend on architectural theories that sound better in words than realized brick and mortar. 

And some just don't make any sense whatsoever. 

Perry World House

Construction on the University of Pennsylvania's Perry World House has just begun on the campus's beautiful Locust Walk. Its purpose as a meeting place to discuss global issues is unique and innovative, but the building itself, well it doesn't make a lot of sense. Its Locust Walk facade is a clear attempt to juxtapose the humble, existing structure against a modern interpretation. But it falls short of balancing old and new by devouring its host. 

But worse than its overwhelming Locust front, it sprawls meaninglessly northward like the rump of a 1976 AMC Pacer. Architecturally speaking, one thing worse than an ugly building is a building that isn't interesting enough to be ugly. And the only thing worse than that is one that doesn't make sense. The Perry World House drudges up images of houses built by the richest family in a small town: it's trying way too hard to address a very simple need. Penn has the resources to know better. 

Pennovation Center East

On the flip side, Penn nailed the Pennovation Center East recently granted approval just across the Schuylkill River. It not only pays homage to the area's industrial roots, it does so in a wild way. With its crystalline windows emerging horizontally from a brick factory, it takes a simple building and stamps it with a wow factor. Like a Loft District warehouse impregnated by the Cira Centre, it blends styles, eras, and purpose in a perfect balance that the Perry World House missed. 

Innovating in the Other Philadelphia

With several skyscraping proposals nearing approval along the Schuylkill Banks, University of the Sciences making itself seen along West Market Street near 36th, and CHoP reaching across the river to develop Schuylkill Avenue, the neighborhood doesn't appear to have much room to expand.

Drexel University and Brandwine Realty Trust want to tackle that by resurrecting a long proposed cap atop the tracks servicing 30th Street Station.

Capping the railroad tracks would add 7 million square feet of developable space to Drexel's existing plans to develop 6.5 million square feet at 33rd and Market.

PlanPhilly.com

At the other end of University City, Penn isn't slacking off. Penn has proposed "South Bank" just on the other side of the southern bend in Schuylkill River at DuPont's former paint factory. With what Penn calls its "Pennovation Center," the details sound like Penn is asking Comcast to bring their A-game with the Comcast Innovation and Technology Center.

It seems like city that once helped innovate America, served as the Workshop of the World for the best part of the Industrial Revolution, might be returning to the forefront of the world's most profitable industries.