Although it is now touted as the “symbolic home” of Temple University, since the 1970s the Baptist Temple on the southwest corner of Berks and Broad had suffered from a quasi-official policy of salutary neglect. Some have gone so far as to sugest that it was the approach of former Temple University president Peter J. Liacouras (1981-2000) to look the other way as the historic cradle of the university mouldered into the ground. While this is unknown, Temple has come around to the idea of adapting (while not preserving) the internal space where charismatic Russell H. Conwell taught a handful of “night owls” seeking upward advancement.

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The following are photos of a model of Park Towne Place. Built in 1958, Park Towne Place was, like Penn Center which preceded it by a few years, an icon of an Edmund Bacon-inspired postwar city on the move. Along with the Youth Study Center and the Ben Franklin Motor Lodge, Park Towne Place stands as a high water mark of the modernist planning insurgence, its presence a sign that postwar planners did not hold sacrosanct the mature Beaux-Arts school’s reigning dominance on the Parkway. And yet unlike the YSC and the Ben Franklin Motor Lodge, the shift in planning paradigms has not rocked Park Towne Place to its core. The YSC stands as testament to modernism’s unshakable belief in the therapeutic potential of “good” design and the motor lodge a reminder of the postwar deference to the automobile–two concepts that have not weathered time, architectural preference, and the realities of urban life very well.

Perhaps because its function is simple: to offer residential amenities in a park-like setting has Park Towne evaded the scorn of modernism’s critics. I don’t know the occupancy of the 17 story units, but people seem to still enjoy living in Philip Johnsonian glass houses. [A new banner proclaims that some units are being rehabilitated--probably to compete with "fresher" condos which really aren't that much more engaging that PTP] Then again the complex’s marginality, its stark shunted-off irrelevance also may play a role in its dodging bullets. In some ways the real Park Towne Place still remains cocooned under a canopy of plexiglass: as a “model” of 1950s city living not really a part of the Parkway or city, but a part of some architectural museum’s storage basement.

Follow the jump for more PTP photos.

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