How a Philadelphia laboratory reshaped the language of modern architecture

In 1957, Louis Kahn sat in his office at the University of Pennsylvania and did something that no architect of his generation dared to do. He took the pipes, ducts, and elevator shafts — all the mechanical guts that modern architects had spent decades trying to hide — and he gave them their own towers. He pulled them outside the building and set them free. The people who commissioned the Richards Medical Research Laboratories wanted a laboratory. What they got was a manifesto in concrete and brick.

A Late Bloomer Who Changed Everything

Louis Isadore Kahn was fifty-six years old when he received the Richards commission. He had been teaching architecture for decades and had designed a handful of buildings — competent ones, respected ones — but nothing that had shaken the world. He was, by all accounts, a quiet, almost monastic figure who spoke about buildings the way a philosopher speaks about truth. He had traveled through Italy, Egypt, and Greece in the early 1950s, and something in those ancient ruins had rearranged his thinking entirely. He came back believing that modern architecture had lost its way — that it had become too slick, too obsessed with efficiency, too willing to pretend that buildings didn't have bones and blood and spirit.

The Richards building, completed on the University of Pennsylvania campus in 1961, was his answer. It announced, in no uncertain terms, that a new voice had entered the conversation.

Served and Servant: The Idea That Split Architecture in Two

The concept is deceptively simple. Kahn divided the building into two kinds of space: served spaces and servant spaces.

The served spaces are the laboratories themselves — vast, column-free rooms, forty-five feet to a side, filled with natural light from oversized corner windows. These are the spaces where scientists think, experiment, discover. They deserve purity. They deserve silence.

The servant spaces are everything else: the stairwells, the ventilation shafts, the elevator cores, the animal quarters. In most buildings, these functions are shoved into the core, hidden behind walls, apologized for. Kahn gave them their own towers — brick-clad cylinders that rise above the laboratory floors like a cluster of industrial minarets. He didn't hide the building's infrastructure. He celebrated it.

Three laboratory towers and a central service tower stand on massive concrete piers, lifted above the ground to create an open, column-free plaza beneath. The composition echoes the medieval towers of San Gimignano, the Tuscan hill town where Kahn had sketched during his Italian travels. But there is nothing medieval about the engineering: 1,019 precast prestressed concrete members, post-tensioned into place with tolerances of one-sixteenth of an inch. The structural engineer, August Komendant, was a pioneer of prestressed concrete. Together, they made the building perform like an intricate clockwork — every piece visible, nothing concealed.

Concrete's Honesty, Kahn's Conviction

There is a reason Kahn chose concrete for the Richards towers, and it has everything to do with what the material wants to be. Concrete, unlike steel or glass, does not pretend to be weightless. It does not try to disappear. It sits in the world with a kind of stubborn, gravitational honesty — heavy, tactile, unapologetic. Kahn understood this instinctively. He once said that a room is not a room without natural light, and he might as well have added that a building is not a building without the honest expression of its structure.

The Richards Medical Center wears its concrete like skin, not makeup. The precast members are visible at every edge and joint. The brick service shafts have a warmth and texture that industrial materials rarely achieve. Walking beneath the building, you can look up and see exactly how it holds itself together — beams, columns, and Vierendeel trusses arranged with the clarity of a musical score.

This is the conviction that drives every piece MyronDesign creates: that materials should be allowed to speak for themselves. That concrete's air bubbles, its subtle color variations, its cool touch — these are not imperfections. They are the language.

Handmade, Because Architecture Deserves It

The Richards Medical Center was built with a precision that bordered on obsession. Each concrete member was cast to within 1.6 millimeters of its intended dimension. The joints were designed to be seen — not hidden behind trim or paint. Kahn insisted that the act of construction should be legible in the finished building, that you should be able to read the story of how it was assembled simply by looking at it.

At MyronDesign, Milo works with a similar belief: that handmade objects carry something factory-made ones cannot. Every desktop sculpture is mixed, poured, and finished by hand. The slight variations in surface texture — a darker patch here, a faint bubble there — are not flaws. They are the evidence of a real person, working with real material, making something that no machine could replicate.

A factory can produce a thousand identical objects. A hand can produce one particular object. And that particularity is what makes it worth keeping.

A Tower on Your Desk

The spirit of Kahn's Richards Medical Center — its bold separation of function and form, its celebration of structure, its conviction that infrastructure deserves to be beautiful — has been distilled into this concrete desktop model. At roughly the scale of an architectural study model, the piece captures the building's most distinctive feature: the cluster of service towers rising above the laboratory blocks, creating that unmistakable silhouette against the sky.

Priced at $88, the model is cast in MyronDesign's signature concrete and finished by hand. Every tower, every shaft, every joint is shaped individually, ensuring that no two pieces are identical. It is, in its own small way, a meditation on Kahn's philosophy: that the parts of a building we usually ignore are often the parts that give it their soul.

Explore the Richards Medical Center model →

Where It Belongs

Picture it on an architect's desk, beside a set of drafting triangles and a half-empty coffee cup — a quiet reminder that the best ideas often come from questioning the basics. Or on a bookshelf between monographs on Brutalism and a well-worn copy of Between Silence and Light, where the concrete's raw surface catches the afternoon light.

It makes a meaningful gift for anyone who has ever looked at a building and wondered why — why the columns are placed where they are, why the stairwells are pushed to the outside, why some rooms feel alive and others feel dead. The Richards model doesn't just represent a building. It represents a way of thinking about buildings.

Kahn once said that a room is not a room without natural light. He might also have said that a desk is not a desk without something on it that makes you stop and think. The Richards Medical Center changed the course of modern architecture by insisting that every part of a building — even the pipes, even the ducts — deserves architectural dignity. That's a lesson worth keeping close.

Browse the full collection of concrete architecture models at myrondesign.com, where every piece tells the story of a building that refused to be ordinary.