There is a building on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania that has confused and thrilled architecture students for well over a century. The Fisher Fine Arts Library — designed by Frank Furness and completed in 1891 — does not look like it belongs next to its neighbors. It doesn’t try to. Its asymmetrical massing, its dense ornamentation, its refusal to be conventional or conciliatory: these were not accidents. They were positions.

Furness took positions.

That is rarer than it sounds. Architecture has always been subject to the pressures of clients, committees, budgets, and fashion. The polite response to those pressures is to compromise — to produce something that offends no one and moves no one. Furness found that response unacceptable. He designed buildings the way a writer of conviction writes: from the inside out, toward an idea, regardless of whether the result would be immediately understood.

He was not rewarded for it in his lifetime. Most of his buildings were demolished in the 20th century — a loss that has been called one of the great acts of architectural vandalism in American history. The ones that survived became touchstones. Louis Kahn returned to them. Robert Venturi wrote about them. Young architects still walk to them.

What they find there is not a style to imitate. It is a standard to meet: the standard of a building that knows what it thinks.

I was asked to speak about Furness this week on CBS Sunday Morning, as part of a segment on Philadelphia’s design identity. I had roughly 20 seconds. It was not enough. So I want to say here what I would have said with more time.

What Furness understood — and what his legacy continues to insist upon — is that architecture is not decoration applied to construction. It is an argument made in material, space, and light. Every building is a statement about what its architect believes a building should do to the person who stands in front of it, who walks through it, who works or worships or heals inside it.

In our practice, that question comes up regardless of project type. It comes up in healthcare facilities, where the difference between a space that feels institutional and a space that feels human is often the difference between anxiety and calm. It comes up in adaptive reuse projects, where an industrial building’s existing character is either honored or erased — and the choice reveals what we value. It comes up in religious spaces, where architecture has to carry the full weight of what a community believes. It comes up in museum exhibit design, where the space must serve the work without overwhelming it.

Furness worked in one city, in one era, with one material palette. But the question he posed is permanent: what does this building owe to the person who encounters it?

Philadelphia still has some of his answers standing. They are worth visiting not to copy, but to be challenged by. A building that makes you uncomfortable — that demands something of you, that refuses to be ignored — is a building that has taken a position.

Our job, still, is to take one.

View the CBS Sunday Morning segment with architect Ian Smith, Ian Smith Design Group HERE.