The new Hillel Center replaces a much smaller facility which was unable to accommodate the variety of community needs for the 6,000 Jewish students on the campus. The new building will be the center of the Jewish community life, and it will contain a rich mix of programmatic spaces. This new facility will be the primary kosher dining facility for the University (managed by University Food Services) and it will accommodate simultaneously the three main Friday night services for up to 500 students. Additionally, it houses spaces for study, recreation, socializing, student activities and Hillel offices.

The facility will occupy a site on 39th Street between Walnut Street and Locust Walk adjacent to 19th century mansions now housing fraternities and academic departments. With a square footage and volume three times that of its neighbors, one architectural challenge has been to design a building that respectfully and sensitively inserts this program among its distinguished neighbors. To that end, the design incorporates a number of features which visually diminish the mass and continue the existing scale of the street. In selecting the 39th Street site in the proposed Hamilton Village development, the University was banking on the new Hillel design to both enliven an otherwise dormant section of 39th Street and to reinforce the scale of the existing 19th and early 20th century buildings adjacent to it. Included among these are four buildings on the National Historic Register – Eisenlor Hall, the University President’s house and gardens, designed by Horace Trumbauer, 1910 the Fels Center for Governmental Studies, designed by Newman and Harris, 1907; ATO House, a former Drexel family residence designed by the Wilson Brothers, 1891, and Sigma Chi House, a former Drexel family residence, designed by Thomas Williamson, 1884.

The program for the new Hillel Center was rich and complex and was a very tight fit for the 12,000 SF available site. Its kosher dining facility, the only one on campus, needed to accommodate 250 students at a sitting during the week, and on Friday evenings, 350. Exhibition-style kitchens and serveries on the first floor for both meat and dairy were supported by a full parve kitchen, storage, dishwashing and management in the basement. Friday evening services for the orthodox, conservative and reform communities would be simultaneous and would attract up to 500 students. The need to accommodate peak occupancies was a significant factor in the design of the building.

Aside from space for dining and religious services, the facility needed to function very much like a student community center, with rooms for student activities, lounges, libraries, conference rooms and auditorium. The need to balance the expression of the community center functions and the dining functions played out on the first floor, resulting in placing much of the food preparation operation in the basement and allowing the lounges and living room to remain by the main entrance.

The building volume was an issue on the site as well. With large spaces in the building for dining, the auditorium, and the Beit Midrash, the necessarily high ceilings caused the floor to floor heights to be 15’ – 16’. The exterior design worked to counteract this relatively large volume with floor and wall setbacks and exterior material changes.

The interior design focus was on the facility’s primary purpose to accommodate students. Selection of furnishings and finishes was biased away from the traditional taste that an older user might wish for and towards a funky and irreverent palette of materials and colors reflecting a higher and different energy level.

Other design features include a large, two-story pleated glass wall which is oriented to the main exterior square of Hamilton Village, which was the subject of and location for an artist competition. Denise Amses and Chris Cosma, glass artists from New York, were selected to provide etched and carved glass panels based upon a passage in the Book of Genesis.