Welcome, Horribly-Placed Transplant House

Remember how everyone was all excited when that mysterious structure cropped up in the empty lot near 40th and Spruce last year? And then we discovered it's actually a temporary residence for families of HUP organ transplant patients and were like, "Uhh..." Tuesday night is the grand opening ceremony for the greatest architectural anomaly on campus since the Radian (even though it doesn't open until July 1...ok).

The 12-suite Clyde F. Barker Transplant House is billed as a "home away from home" for guests, replete with a kitchen, gym, laundry facility, and the fancy courtyard pictured above. A homey accommodation indeed! Visitors will surely assimilate alongside Penn students, wedged between Allegro and the Phi Psi chapter house on a dirty street littered with beer cans, thrust into the bowels of Penn culture on the corner of 40th and Blackout -- these families will have no trouble understanding what "home" means to us and feel like old locals in no time!

By reducing travel and meal expenses and facilitating close proximity between patients and loved ones, the low-cost housing center is intended to "ease some of the economic and emotional stresses" placed on kin. We give tremendous props to the Penn Health System for this initiative -- HUP isn't one of the best hospitals in the nation for nothing. But if they intend to keep emotional stress to a minimum, they better hope no families of liver transplant patients check in anytime soon, especially during NSO.