Statue of Edgar Fahs Smith

The Fisher Fine Arts Library was the primary library of the University of Pennsylvania from 1891 to 1962. The red sandstone, brick-and-terra-cotta Venetian Gothic giant—part fortress and part cathedral—was designed by the acclaimed Philadelphia architect Frank Furness (1839–1912). The cornerstone was laid in October 1888, construction was completed in late 1890, and the building was dedicated in February 1891.Following completion of the Van Pelt Library in 1962, it was renamed the Furness Building (after its architect), and housed the university's art and architecture collections. The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1985.The Furness Building was renamed the Anne and Jerome Fisher Fine Arts Library following a 6-year, $16.5-million restoration, completed in 1991. It is located on the east side of College Green, at Locust Walk and 34th Street.

The University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design is the design school of the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. It offers degrees in architecture, landscape architecture, city and regional planning, historic preservation, and fine arts, as well as several dual degrees with other graduate schools at the University of Pennsylvania. Formerly known as PennDesign, it was renamed in 2019 after Stuart Weitzman donated an undisclosed sum.

Meyerson Hall is a building in West Philadelphia, and the site of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. The building, designed by the architecture firm of Martin, Stewart, Noble & Class, was constructed in 1967 in reinforced concrete, brick cavity wall, and asbestos, with a total area of the building is 93,780 square feet (8,712 m2). It is named for Martin Meyerson, President of the University of Pennsylvania from 1970 to 1981. Meyerson Hall is located at the corner of Walnut Street and South 34th Street in University City, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Immediately adjacent to the south is the Fisher Fine Arts Library, designed by Frank Furness and completed in 1890. Immediately to the west is the College Green, the heart of the University. The building currently houses the main offices of the following departments of the School of Design: Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Historic Preservation, and City and Regional Planning. Fine Arts is the only department in the school not housed in Meyerson, and is located across 34th St. in the Morgan Building. The Basement contains the newly opened PennDesign Cafe, eight lecture halls, custodial staff support spaces, and the materials library. The Ground Floor contains the main lobby, Lower Gallery, faculty offices and the Operations and Planning office. The First Floor contains departmental offices for Landscape Architecture, Preservation, and Urban Planning, Dean's Alley critique space, the Upper Gallery, and offices for the Dean, Alumni Affairs, Admissions, and the Registrar. The Second Floor contains offices for Architecture, as well as studio space. The Third Floor contains two computer labs, a plotter room, student lounge (with vending machines), and additional architecture studio space. The Fourth Floor contains studios for Landscape Architecture and Historic Preservation, the Architectural Conservation Laboratory, the Fabrication Laboratory, and the 4th Floor Hall critique space.

The Penn Institute for Urban Research (Penn IUR) is an interdisciplinary research center at the University of Pennsylvania. The Institute is affiliated with the 12 schools at the University of Pennsylvania, and housed at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design.The Institute was founded in 2004, and focuses on three main research areas: 1) Exploring innovative urban development strategies; 2) Building the inclusive 21st century sustainable city; and 3) Understanding the role of anchor institutions in urban places.Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter are the Co-Directors of Penn IUR.

The Curtis Organ, named for publisher Cyrus H.K. Curtis, is one of the largest pipe organs in the world with 162 ranks and 10,731 pipes. The concert organ, of American Symphonic design, was manufactured by the Austin Organ Company as its Opus 1416 in 1926 for the Philadelphia Sesquicentennial Exposition. It was known as the "Organists' Organ" because the specifications were formulated by Henry S. Fry, John M'E. Ward, Rollo F. Maitland, Frederick Maxson, and S. Wesley Sears, all prominent Philadelphia organists.Curtis acquired the instrument after the Exposition went bankrupt and donated it to the University of Pennsylvania, where it was divided into two halves and incorporated into Irvine Auditorium at the time of the building's construction. The organ contains the largest Universal Air Chest ever built by Austin. In its original configuration in the Auditorium building, the organ spread 75 feet across its platform at the Sesquicentennial Exposition. This pressurized room under the pipes allows access to the organ's pneumatic mechanisms while it is playing, and was touted as being able to seat 100 people to dinner comfortably. The organ's mechanical actions were renewed in the 1950s through the generosity of Mary Louise Curtis Bok Zimbalist, daughter of Cyrus H.K. Curtis and founder of The Curtis Institute of Music. In the later 1980s and early 1990s, the organ was connected to a customized MIDI interface, making it, at that time, the world's largest MIDI-capable instrument. In more recent times, the Austin Organ Company carried out a complete mechanical restoration of the organ (with a new console and relay system added), carefully preserving the organ's tonal integrity. It was rededicated in October 2002. In October 1972 Keith Chapman accompanied the Lon Chaney silent film "[The Phantom of the Opera]" as a fund-raiser for the organ that evolved into an annual campus Halloween event. Cyrus Curtis also gave an Austin organ to nearby Drexel University, and to the auditorium of City Hall in Portland, Maine.

Irvine Auditorium is a performance venue at 3401 Spruce Street on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. It was designed by the firm of prominent Philadelphia area architect Horace Trumbauer and built 1926–1932. Irvine Auditorium is notable for its nearly 11,000-pipe Curtis Organ, the world's 22nd-largest pipe organ (by ranks), originally built for the Sesquicentennial Exposition of 1926 and donated to the university in 1928. The building was opened in May, 1929. A persistent but untrue campus legend holds that the building was a Penn architecture student's design project that received a failing grade. He was forced to give up architecture to go into business, where he amassed a fortune. Years later, he made a major bequest to the university in his will, but only on the condition that his project be built. Seating capacity is 1,260. (Prior to renovation the seating capacity was 1,976.) The octagonal auditorium featured side balconies that faced each other, at right angles to the stage. The building was restored and renovated in 1997–2000 by Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates, Inc, who removed the side balconies to improve the acoustic quality, as well as to create more intimate performance spaces.

College Hall is the oldest building on the West Philadelphia campus of the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to its construction, the university was located on Ninth Street in Center City, Philadelphia. The building was designed by Thomas Webb Richards and completed in 1873. The characteristic green color of the building is due to its composition of green serpentine stone. College Hall was placed on the National Register of Historic Places February 14, 1978. It is also a contributing property of the University of Pennsylvania Campus Historic District. The building currently houses the undergraduate admissions office, the university president's offices, the Department of History, and classrooms. The top floor of College Hall is also home to the Philomathean Society, a literary society founded in 1813. Although College Hall and the now-demolished Blanchard Hall were rumored to be the model for the Victorian Gothic mansion in The Addams Family cartoons, the cartoonist Charles Addams repeatedly denied the claims.

The institution now known as the University of Pennsylvania was founded as a secondary school in 1740 and by the time of the American Revolution had grown to include a college and medical school called the College of Philadelphia. While it operated under a state charter, it was a private institution with its own board of trustees. Many were Loyalists, and when the revolutionary government of Pennsylvania regained control of the city of Philadelphia after the British occupation of 1777-8, it rechartered the institution as the "University of the State of Pennsylvania," appointed new trustees, and dismissed Provost William Smith. Following repeated lawsuits by Smith and the original trustees, the state restored the College's charter in 1789, but the University continued to operate on the original campus. The two competing institutions merged in 1791, forming the University of Pennsylvania.

The Joseph H. Lauder Institute of Management & International Studies (The Lauder Institute) offers a joint degree program at the University of Pennsylvania, combining an MA in international studies from the School of Arts & Sciences with an MBA from The Wharton School or JD from the Law School. Students pursue one of six Programs of Concentration focused on five regional areas (Africa, East and Southeast Asia, Europe, Latin America, or South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa) or the Global Program. Within the regional Programs of Concentration, students must attain superior language proficiency based upon an oral proficiency interview certified by Language Testing International in either Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish. Each year 60-70 students from around the world join the Lauder Program in May starting in Philadelphia before departing on an 8-week summer immersion to their respective regions of study. Students return to campus in August to join the MBA or JD program and then graduate with their class two years later. In the most recent incoming class, 60% of the class were US Citizens and 40% were international or dual citizens.

The Charles Patterson Van Pelt Library (also known as the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, and simply Van Pelt) is the primary library at the University of Pennsylvania. The building was designed by architects Harbeson, Hough, Livingston & Larson, and built in 1962. It has a gross area of 201,215 square feet (18,693 m2). In addition to being the primary library on campus for social sciences and humanities, it also houses the Lippincott Library of The Wharton School, the Ormandy Music Library, and the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. Van Pelt houses strong Area Studies collections in African, Japanese, Latin American, Chinese, Middle East, South Asia, and Judaica & Ancient Near East Studies. The Henry Charles Lea Library is located on the 6th floor of Van Pelt Library. The library holds the Weigle Information Commons, located on the west side of the 1st floor. Vaguely Grecian with a massive colonnade, but screened by brick panels with small windows that resemble an old French library, the Van Pelt Library is a major presence on the campus. A large modern art sculpture, called The Button, sits at its southern entrance.

ENIAC (; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945. There were other computers that had these features, but the ENIAC had all of them in one package. It was Turing-complete and able to solve "a large class of numerical problems" through reprogramming.Although ENIAC was designed and primarily used to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory (which later became a part of the Army Research Laboratory), its first program was a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon.ENIAC was completed in 1945 and first put to work for practical purposes on December 10, 1945.ENIAC was formally dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania on February 15, 1946, having cost $487,000 (equivalent to $5,900,000 in 2020), and was heralded as a "Giant Brain" by the press. It had a speed on the order of one thousand times faster than that of electro-mechanical machines; this computational power, coupled with general-purpose programmability, excited scientists and industrialists alike. The combination of speed and programmability allowed for thousands more calculations for problems. As ENIAC calculated a trajectory in 30 seconds that took a human 20 hours, one ENIAC could replace 2,400 humans.ENIAC was formally accepted by the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps in July 1946. It was transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland in 1947, where it was in continuous operation until 1955.

Houston Hall is the student union of the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Completed in 1896, it was the first student union built on an American college campus.Houston Hall was listed as a National Register of Historic Places contributing property in the University of Pennsylvania Campus Historic District in 1978.