Frank Furness finished the Fine Arts Library in 1891, and it’s the building that made his reputation. Louis Kahn kept a photograph of it on his office wall. Penn started a $17.8 million exterior restoration in April 2025 and expects to finish in November 2026, with the library open the entire time.
Project Scope
The work is envelope, start to finish. Cleaning the red sandstone and brick. Replacing windows. Repairing the roof. Installing lightning protection, and permanent fall-protection anchors so future maintenance crews can work the roofscape safely instead of rigging from scratch every time. There are no planned closures. Readers have been working under scaffolding for eighteen months and will keep doing it through the fall.
Why It Matters
Furness’s exterior is a catalogue of materials that don’t behave alike: red sandstone, brick, terracotta, and a roofscape of dormers, chimneys and turrets that gives water a hundred places to get in. Cleaning it is not a pressure-washing exercise, and matching the repointing is not a mix-design exercise. The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1985, so the specification behind each of those decisions gets reviewed rather than assumed.
The fall-protection anchors are the quiet part of the scope and probably the most consequential. A landmark building with no permanent roof anchors gets maintained less often, because every gutter clearing and slate repair turns into a rigging job with its own approvals. Putting anchors in during a restoration is how you make the next forty years of maintenance affordable, and it’s the kind of line item that gets cut first when a restoration budget tightens.
The library holds Penn’s fine arts and architecture collections, with the Weitzman School’s studios in the adjoining Duhring Wing.
Project Team & Details
| Owner / Client | University of Pennsylvania |
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| Status | Under Construction |
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| Funding Source | Institutional |
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