Arts Café Expansion & Renovation

Founded in 1995 by a group of students, faculty, staff and alumni, the Kelly Writers House serves as a center for writers of all kinds from Penn and the Philadelphia region at large. Each semester the Writers House hosts approximately 150 public programs and projects—poetry readings, film screenings, seminars, web magazines, lectures, dinners, radio broadcasts, workshops, art exhibits, and musical performances—and about 500 people visit the House each week.

After twenty years, the Arts Café is at a point where its expanded usage has outpaced its capacity. The use of the room grew beyond its physical capabilities, both spatially and technologically. The goals of the Arts Café renovation were to increase event space capacity through expanding the existing structure in a sensitive and compatible way, and to modernize the space by improving the comfort, acoustics, lighting, and audiovisual capabilities to align the quality of production and performance to match the quality of the programming and content.