The Richards Medical Research Laboratories, located on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, were designed by architect Louis Kahn and are considered to have been a breakthrough in his career.

Brick shafts on the periphery hold stairwells and air ducts, producing an effect reminiscent of the ancient Italian towers that Kahn had painted several years earlier.

Rather than being supported by a hidden steel frame, the building has a structure of reinforced concrete that is clearly visible and openly depicted as bearing weight.

Although considered to be separate buildings by the university, the Richards and Goddard Laboratories are physically connected and, with similar designs, have the appearance of being a single unit.

[7]: 491  It was named in honor of David Rockwell Goddard, a professor of Botany who also served as university provost and who was the main force in planning and raising funds for it.

Each tower is supported by eight external columns that are attached to the four edges of each floor at "third-point" locations, the two points on each side that divide it into three equal parts.

In it she says that "observers immediately understood them to be a profound statement of American architectural style that provided a potent design alternative to International Modernism, chiefly as it was embodied in the work of Mies van der Rohe (and in particular as it was epitomized by his Seagram Building)".

[8]: 15  This design alternative was provided, she notes, through their clear expression of served and servant spaces, their evocation of the architecture of the past, and their structure of reinforced concrete that is clearly visible and openly depicted as bearing weight, approaches that "countered the philosophy of International Modernism of undifferentiated, universal space and volume and of the minimization of the appearance of weight and load through such constructional devices as the glass curtain wall and the predominance of structural steel.

[12]: 21  With the Richards Medical Research Laboratories Kahn showed a way forward with a design that was clearly in the Modern style and yet evoked images from the past.

"[5]: 104 While studying the classic architecture of Italy, Greece and Egypt during a visit in the early 1950s, a few years prior to his work on the Richards Laboratories, Kahn was so moved by the results that had been obtained in the past by thick and massive building materials that he decided to forego the thin and light-weight materials that were most typical of Modern architecture and instead base his work on concrete and masonry.

[2] This was the first of several outstanding buildings that Kahn and Komendant worked on together, two of which won the prestigious Twenty-five Year Award given by the American Institute of Architects.

The structure of the Richards building is composed of 1019 pre-stressed concrete columns, beams, trusses and related items that were trucked in from a factory, assembled with a crane like children's blocks, and locked into place with post-tensioning cables running in all three dimensions, something like an old-style toy that is floppy until its parts are pulled together tightly with a string.

Komendant worked closely with the manufacturer to ensure that outcome, with the result that the largest offset between any two elements in the finished structure was only 1⁄16 inch (1.6 mm).

Kahn left the entire ground floor of that tower open as an entry porch and exposed the structural elements in its ceiling so the public could see how the building was constructed.

Particularly interesting are the Vierendeel trusses that support each floor and whose large rectangular openings allow ducts and pipes to be easily routed through the laboratory ceilings.

[7]: 116 Although widely recognized by the architectural community as embodying important new ideas, the Richards Laboratories had significant shortcomings from the viewpoint of the scientists who worked there.

A major preoccupation of Kahn's subsequent career was finding ways of avoiding glare by providing natural light indirectly.

He designed each floor of the laboratory towers potentially as one large room and trusted that the scientists would see the desirability of keeping it that way to encourage the interchange of ideas.