245 S 3rd St, Philadelphia, PA 19106

There are few addresses in Philadelphia where architecture and history meet as seamlessly as they do at 245 S 3rd Street. In the late 1950s, the City of Philadelphia handed architect I.M. Pei one of the most consequential urban design commissions in American history: the transformation of a derelict food market at the edge of Society Hill into a new model for city living. Pei, the architect who would later stun Paris with the Louvre Pyramid, reshape the National Mall with the East Building of the National Gallery of Art, and reimagine the Hong Kong skyline with the Bank of China Tower, designed this home. Pei's solution for Society Hill was a masterwork of urban intelligence. He positioned his trio of soaring concrete towers close to the Delaware River, then designed a series of three-story townhouses — planned around private courtyard quadrangles — to create a seamless, unhurried transition from his modernist towers to the colonial row houses of one of America's oldest...