Alfred Panepinto (1907-94 ) pursued a fifty-year career in architecture in greater Philadelphia after completing his architectural education at Harvard University in 1931. His long-term employment by Sun Oil Co., beginning in 1934, laid the foundation for his success. A notable feature of his career was his frequent service to clients noted for a commitment to conservative politics, notably J. Howard Pew of Sun Oil. In the 1950s and 1960s Panepinto built a significant number of structures for academic institutions, including Grove City College and the PMC Colleges (later Widener University) in Pennsylvania and Hampton Institute in Virginia. Examination of those and several other of Panepinto’s contemporary academic buildings for Philadelphia institutions sheds light on the compositional strategies the architect employed to achieve effects that were unequivocally Modern yet appealing to clients opposed to the progressivism often associated with mid-20th-centruy Modernism. This light permits a new assessment of the so-called retreat from Modernism ca. 1960 as well as of the precocious Postmodernism of the Philadelphia School.
About the presenterAlfred Willis
Alfred Willis is an independent scholar in the Nashville, Tennessee, area. His current research includes work on Southern Modernism and the architectural history of the American community mausoleum.