Korman Center Renewal Gets Under Way at Drexel

The Korman family has donated $8 million to help Drexel turn its computer center back into the campus living room. It will even get a front porch in the process.

A Korman (and Drexel) family portrait. | Photo: Sandy Smith

A Korman (and Drexel) family portrait post-groundbreaking. | Photo: Sandy Smith

When Drexel University moved its library across 33rd Street from the heart of campus in 1977, the family of Maximilian Korman (Class of 1929) and Samuel Korman (Class of 1934) made a d0nation intended to turn the building into a campus social and study center.

Over the years, the couches were replaced by computers as the university became an early adopter of networked microcomputer technology. Today, in a ceremonial groundbreaking, the Korman family joined Drexel University President John Fry in launching a reconstruction project that will return the 58-year-old Korman Center to the role the family envisioned for it, namely, the beating heart of the campus’ academic quadrant.

“This project has been wanting to happen for so long,” Fry told the audience at the ceremony before once again thanking the Kormans for giving it the push it needed.

Fry began the ceremony by noting that Max and Sam both studied architecture at night at Drexel before joining their father Hyman Korman in building the real estate empire that bears the family name. Dozens of their descendants were on hand today to renew their ties and commitment to the university: “This is actually a Korman family reunion,” Fry said of the event.

But it was also a celebration both of how much the Drexel campus has changed since 1977 and the next stage in its transformation. The $16 million reconstruction project will give the Korman Center new space and a new face, one of light metal and glass covered by a cantilevered terra-cotta screen that will at once shade the interior from the sun’s rays and serve as the canopy for the building’s new “front porch.”

The porch will serve as the transition point from a new, greener central quadrangle that will also bear the Korman name to a new, two-story-high lobby surrounded by spaces for socializing with study lounges upstairs. Richard Gluckman, partner at project architect Gluckman Tang, said, “Our concept is to create a new living room and a new front porch for Drexel” in “an iconic structure, moderate in size but large in scale.”

José Almiñana, principal at Andropogon Associates, the project’s landscape architect, said of the new “front yard” his firm is designing, “We’re going to put the woods back into Woodland Walk.” The redesigned Korman Quandrangle will feature large shade trees that will form a canopy over a lawn with multiple seating opportunities; the palette of materials and plantings will extend the firm’s adjacent Perelman Plaza into the center of the campus.

The ultimate goal of the expansion project, Fry said, is to create “what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called ‘the great good place.'” (Oldenburg’s influential book by that name documented the role public social spaces and businesses such as coffee houses and barbershops played in knitting communities together.)

Lauren Altman (Class of 2016), the newest member of the Korman family to graduate from Drexel, emphasized the collaborative nature of study at Drexel in describing what the revamped Korman Center would facilitate. In a speech liberally sprinkled with the undergraduate shorthand term “collab,” Altman praised the way the school encourages students to cross disciplinary lines.

Following the speechifying, Fry, Altman, Gluckman and Alimaña joined Drexel Board of Trustees Chairman Richard Greenwalt (Class of 1966) and the three Korman family members who run the Hyman Korman Foundation — Berton, Leonard and Steven — in turning the ceremonial first shovels of dirt. (The family’s contribution to the project is being made through the foundation.) Then all the assembled members of the Korman clan joined the groundbreakers for a family portrait.

The new Korman Center and Quadrangle are set to be completed by the fall of 2017.



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