If you stand in a certain spot near the Philadelphia Museum of Art and look down the length of Benjamin Franklin Parkway, an artistic lineage unfolds: three works by three generations of Calders. In the distance, the 37-foot-tall bronze statue of William Penn by Alexander Milne Calder (the 20th-century sculptor’s grandfather, who lived in the city for 55 years) looms atop the elaborate architectural confection of City Hall. Midway, his son, Alexander Stirling Calder, posed three reclining Art Deco figures in a fountain, representing the three main waterways of the city. (When the fountain opened during a heat wave in 1924, thousands of people danced the tango in the streets to celebrate it.) And then, inside the museum hangs a mobile by the most famous Calder of all, Alexander Calder, its white disks floating—at once ethereal and pronounced—against the sandy-colored stone columns of the Great Stair Hall. (The father, the son, and the “unholy ghost,” Alexander Calder reportedly liked to joke of the familial arrangement.) Notoriously reluctant to participate in the naming conventions required by collectors and curators, he called this mobile Ghost.
This fall, a new fortification of the Calder axis will open to the public. Calder Gardens is declaratively not a museum, but rather a space for the public to explore and experience Calder in a new light—the only such venue solely dedicated to his work in the world. Designed by architect Jacques Herzog with gardens by Piet Oudolf, the building doesn’t announce itself as most of the grand institutions along the parkway do, with their multistory structures and colonnaded fronts. Rather, it appears like a low-slung metallic blade, rising out of a landscape covered in wildflowers and native grasses, young trees arranged in clusters. There is no sign at the front, but a sculpture—Cock’s Comb, on loan from the Whitney—near the entrance will gesture toward its intent. (When I approached the site on a steamy late-July afternoon, notices tacked to the temporary fencing announced that it would be “open to interpretation” in September.)
“The idea is that you get lost, or at least you get disoriented, in a really interesting way,” says Juana Berrío, the director of programs for Calder Gardens, who guides me, with William McDowell, the project manager, through the grounds. “It is a place where the invitation is to go inwards.” She is planning “silent days” and visits from shamanic figures to attract a whole new demographic to Calder’s work.
Calder may be a native son for the city (he was born there in 1898), but the genesis of this institution was a halting process, spurred on by a string of determined men. More than three decades ago, there had been a failed effort to create a Calder museum; plans were even commissioned from architect Tadao Ando before running aground for various reasons. However, a Philadelphia philanthropist named H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest was unwilling to let the idea go, and all but ordered another Philadelphia philanthropist, Joseph Neubauer, to carry it through.
“The first thing you have to know about me is I’m an immigrant,” says Neubauer, simultaneously gruff and warm, when I speak to him. (He means it in the Hamilton sense: He gets the job done. Neubauer’s parents were Holocaust survivors, and he emigrated to the US as a teen.) He had been instrumental in moving the Barnes Foundation from outside Philadelphia into the center of the city—a controversial migration of the famous art collection that greatly expanded its visitorship—and so he was charged by Lenfest with giving Calder an appropriate celebration in the city of his birth. “He said, ‘Joe, you ought to do it. You’ve got to make sure that Sandy commits.’ ”
“Sandy” is Sandy Rower, the grandson of Alexander Calder and the president of the Calder Foundation. “I got a call from a guy named Joe Neubauer, who I’d never met before, proposing to do a museum in Calder’s hometown,” he says. But Rower, who describes himself to me as “more of a futurist,” wasn’t all that interested in establishing a museum to honor his grandfather: “Just kind of hermetically sealing some Calder in the space for people to read wall labels is not what we want to do,” he tells me over the phone. “Sandy and I were arm-wrestling for a bit,” says Neubauer.
What did interest Rower was the idea of a kind of sacred space that reasserted what his grandfather’s art had been all about: not the commodified knickknacks sold in gift shops around the world, but pieces “that harmonize with humans and tend to generate a mysterious effect—an elevated psyche, an elevated experience.” Think of permanent installations imbued with the solemnity of religion (the Rothko Chapel in Houston or James Turrell’s Skyspaces, with their invitations to contemplate the sublime), but also religious spaces imbued with the beauty of art (Matisse’s Chapelle du Rosaire in Nice or the Union Church of Pocantico Hills in Westchester, New York, with its stained glass windows by Marc Chagall).
Of course, it was possible that the city, which had lent the land for the first museum project and was willing to do so again, might not take kindly to the idea of public funds being used for something described as a “chapel.” Herzog, whom Rower and Neubauer eventually hired for the project, wasn’t so keen on the idea anyway. “We wanted to avoid religious connotations because we want to avoid any form of pretentiousness,” Herzog says.
His involvement seemed a bit improbable even to the men who hired him. The Swiss architect and cofounder, along with Pierre de Meuron, of the firm Herzog de Meuron is best known for monumental projects—the conversion of the Bankside Power Station into London’s Tate Modern; the giant Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing, built for the 2008 Olympics. At just 20,000 square feet on a two-ish-acre plot, the footprint of Calder Gardens would be much more modest. “It’s a tiny little project for him,” Rower notes. But the challenge was appealing to Herzog in part because of its foundational idea—that this would be both more and less than a conventional museum. It would not need to accommodate a dedicated collection, but rather host a rotating set of works, and more importantly, honor the broader mission of the Calder Foundation. “It was a very evolutionary project,” Herzog says. “Every step was a discovery.”
At one point, Herzog came across an image of a Calder sculpture nestled amid lush poolside greenery at the Colombe d’Or Hotel in France, and that photo stayed with him. He eventually came to the conclusion that the institution should appear as a garden before it appeared as a building. “I became aware,” he says, from his home outside Basel, “that it shouldn’t really be an object or a form.” Still, the art brought in—some of it owned by the Calder Foundation, some of it on loan, some of it coming from private collections and never before seen—would have to go somewhere. “You have to create space,” says Herzog, “so going underground was an obvious way to do this. It was shaping through excavation rather than through building.”
I had watched a lecture in which Herzog described the various components that came together to make the building: a disc, concave like a lens; a staircase that would double as stadium-style seating; a large wall attached to a ceiling that would slice through the airspace of a tall, belowground gallery. And still nothing quite prepared me for the complex structure, which is at once warren- and cathedral-like. Much architecture references the principle, propounded by Frank Lloyd Wright, of “compression and release”—the idea that you more fully feel an architectural opening when you pass through a confined space—but here, the sensation is magnified by the subterranean descent. There is something primal about certain rooms, their walls variously covered in concrete imprinted with the ghostly trace of wood grain and a pebbly black composite. (“I call this the wormhole,” Berrío says, affectionately, as we walk down one dark and enveloping staircase.) You feel as though you are traveling through the layers of the earth, and then you enter a light-filled atrium, where, by some trick of angles and solar cycles, sunlight streams in. It seems, paradoxically, like the lower you go, the lighter it becomes.
Herzog wanted each gallery not only to emphasize or accommodate the art, but also to have its own personality. So at the back of one large room, there is an almost hidden space where a mobile will be mounted, bright and crisp against the stark backdrop. Elsewhere, in a dark, niche-like side gallery, the works of Calder’s grandfather, father, and mother—an accomplished portraitist—will hang. “Architecture can do much more than just be useful,” Herzog says. “It has to function. But beyond that, it has to seduce people.”
If the building is a surreptitious structure that fully reveals itself only as one traverses it, the garden is more essential to the first impression. I had been warned before my arrival that the gardens would be in a very nascent state. But on the day of my tour, clusters of black-eyed Susans bob merrily in the hazy heat; bumblebees float amid the echinacea flowers; and the lilac-colored allium pom-poms cheerily dance on their slender green stalks. Despite that vibrant horticultural collage, Oudolf—who revolutionized the way we think about native plantings through landmark gardens at New York City’s High Line and Chicago’s Lurie Garden—tells me that color is never his primary consideration. “Color is temporary for two, three, or four weeks sometimes. You cannot count on it,” he says. “You can only count on the character of plants and how you put them together in a sort of organic and more compositional way. You compose with the plant’s characters.”
Oudolf’s work came toward the later phases of what had become a long and iterative project. (“The landscape follows the building,” he says modestly. “Whatever they do, I have to work with.”) Much of the designing took place during the pandemic, when Herzog sketched many of his ideas on paper—“on a napkin, on a placemat,” Rower reports—took pictures, and sent them back to his team. He, Rower, and Neubauer communicated “almost every step of the process,” Herzog says. “It forced me to be very honest with my own thinking.”
But the gardens, after which the institution is appropriately named, will undoubtedly be central to the effect Calder Gardens has on the city and the world. “Life needs spiritual conviction outside the churches,” Calder’s father wrote at one point, and one can imagine longtime Calder devotees, a tourist ambling down the parkway, or a visitor enchanted by the sight of waving grasses and winter seedpods swaying on their stalks finding such inspiration and solace here.
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