When the complete length of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway opened in 1918, it had been under construction for eleven years, and it had been the subject of dreaming and planning for decades longer. Even then, it would be another nine years before the first public building (the Free Library) opened. What kept this idea alive for so long, and what keeps it alive today? This talk will explore the long history of the parkway, glimpsing at what was there before, how its design changed to meet changing circumstances, and the stories of a few of its notable buildings. Today, the City of Philadelphia’s Parks and Recreation Department is working with Design Workshop, a national landscape architecture, planning, and urban design firm, to reimagine the Parkway for the 21st century, and we'll end with a look at their preliminary proposals.

David Brownlee, the Frances Shapiro-Weitzenhoffer Professor Emeritus of the History of Art, is a historian of modern architecture and urbanism in Europe and America. He taught for his entire career at the University of Pennsylvania, where he won the Outstanding Teaching Award of the College Alumni Society and the university’s Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. In 1997-2023 he directed the creation of the university’s “College House” system, which brought faculty residents and academic resources into all undergraduate residences.  

 He has written about the nineteenth-century architecture of Britain, Germany, and France, and an important focus of his scholarship is the architecture and planning of Philadelphia in the twentieth century. His Philadelphia books include histories of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the Penn campus, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Barnes Foundation and studies of the architects Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi, and Denise Scott Brown.  He has won the major publication prizes of the Society of Architectural Historians (USA), its British counterpart, and the American Institute of Architects. He was named a Fellow by the SAH in 2015, which in 2020 established the international Brownlee Dissertation Prize in his honor.