One of the best things about Philadelphia’s Calder Gardens—a remarkably successful collaboration between the Dutch horticultural designer Piet Oudolf and the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron that opened to the public in September—is that amid the contoured earth mounds and dense flower beds that surround and surmount the subterranean museum there are no works by the man for whom it is named. Only as you come close to the entrance of this jewellike, nearly invisible structure are you confronted with Alexander Calder’s The Cock’s Comb (1960), a spiky, black-painted sheet metal stabile (a word coined by Jean Arp to parallel his friend’s more famous free-hanging mobiles, a term devised by another Calder intimate, Marcel Duchamp). You then descend into Herzog & de Meuron’s intriguing sequence of underground galleries to find a profusion of works by the artist who transformed accepted notions of sculpture as thoroughly as Picasso transformed painting.
This scrupulous segregation is commendable, for although the adornment of nature with art has existed since prehistoric times, such juxtapositions often do little to enhance either. There are, of course, notable exceptions, especially when large-scale modern sculpture of the highest quality is displayed in expansive outdoor settings—the thrilling five-hundred-acre Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley immediately springs to mind. But much more common is the tendency to overcrowd three-dimensional artworks in smaller open-air venues, which undermines their display, or does nature a disservice, or both.
For example, the beguilingly ad hoc character of the High Line of 2003–2019 in Manhattan—with the plantings that first brought Oudolf international fame—has been undermined by a plethora of temporary art installations along the mile-and-a-half elevated park. On occasion those works, some of dubious merit, have overwhelmed the High Line’s natural components, which are meant to evoke the indigenous vegetation that once thrived on the disused train trestle. In contrast, the Philadelphia scheme—which cost an estimated $70 million, small change as present-day museum projects go—achieves a well-nigh perfect equilibrium among art, architecture, and landscape.
Oudolf’s foremost contribution to contemporary horticulture has been his insistence that gardens, even in temperate climates with pronounced seasonal changes, are meant to be enjoyed throughout the year, which requires a new attitude toward plantings in all stages of growth and decay. Rather than utilizing tender species that have a short flowering period and need careful cultivation and intensive watering, he favors hardier, drought-resistant, longer-blooming varieties that are native to a region or similar to local species. His signature strategy is to mass plants profusely along extended swaths, which gives them a drifting, windblown continuity quite different from the meticulous organization of herbaceous borders in the classical Anglo-Dutch tradition that prevailed throughout most of the twentieth century. Oudolf directs that when the growing season is over, dead perennials should be left in place so that their silhouettes—skeletal stalks, bulging seedpods, withered leaves, and dangling panicles—form compositions that he deems just as beautiful as the garden at its summer peak.
Visitors to Calder Gardens encounter no fewer than 195 varieties of perennials, some 37,000 plants in all, which were set in place by platoons of volunteer gardeners who worked for months in advance of the opening. The site is gracefully framed by trees that range from an overstory of tall oaks and black tupelos to an understory of shrubs including magnolia, viburnum, and witch hazel. Adding distinctive profiles and textures to the undulating surfaces of the beds are several varieties of echinacea, more descriptively known as coneflowers because of their protruding seed heads; butterfly weed, a sturdy asclepias that grows to three feet tall and retains its dried seedpods long after lepidoptera depart for warmer climes; and heuchera, familiarly known as coral bells, which keeps its purple-bronze coloration from summer through winter. There seems little doubt that Oudolf’s well-reasoned revisionism will exert considerable influence on gardening practices in this country as more people are exposed to his conservation-minded concepts.
Philadelphia’s newest tourist attraction occupies a trapezoidal full-block site of just under two acres on Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the broad, tree-shaded boulevard constructed between 1917 and 1929 to the designs of the French architect Jacques Gréber. During the ascendancy of the Beaux-Arts-inspired City Beautiful movement, Philadelphia was America’s third-largest city, and its urban planners fretted that the tidy seventeenth-century grid layout established by the Pennsylvania Colony’s founder, William Penn, who adhered to the austere aesthetic of his Quaker faith, lacked the civic grandeur a radial thoroughfare could impart. With the same disregard for existing neighborhoods demonstrated in Second Empire Paris by Baron Haussmann (albeit on a much smaller scale), Gréber cut a bold diagonal from City Hall at the epicenter of Penn’s foursquare plan to a terminus one mile to the northwest at the high outcropping known as Fairmount.
Atop that veritable acropolis is the Philadelphia Art Museum of 1919–1928 (which this fall changed its name, rather pointlessly, from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, part of a controversial “rebranding” that led to the firing of its director, Sasha Suda, in November). This ocher-colored riff on an ancient Greek temple is nominally credited to the firm of Horace Trumbauer, but it owed much to the work of his chief designer, the Black architect Julian Abele. Nearby at street level is the museum’s Perelman Building, an Art Deco office structure that in 2007 was remodeled as an exhibition annex by Gluckman Mayner Architects but has been closed since the pandemic. Directly across the parkway from Calder Gardens is an endearing Neoclassical bijou: the Rodin Museum of 1926–1929, designed by the French Beaux-Arts-trained architect Paul Philippe Cret. Two sculptural titans are thus now fittingly face-to-face, Rodin the culminating figure of an ancient representational tradition that was revived during the Renaissance and Calder the initiating figure of a modernist reconception that took the medium off its pedestal.
Philadelphia’s Parkway Museums District, as it’s now designated, gained further importance with the opening of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s Barnes Foundation of 2004–2012, catercorner across the parkway from Calder Gardens and next to the Rodin Museum. Relocated from its original home in suburban Merion, it has long been renowned for Albert C. Barnes’s deep holdings of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting, which are now displayed in a handsome structure that replicates the galleries as Barnes quirkily arranged them in Merion—a concession required by the legal settlement that facilitated the move.*
The creation of Calder Gardens was enabled by a public–private partnership administered by the Calder and Barnes Foundations, supported by a group of Philadelphia philanthropists, and built on land provided by the city, like the Barnes. The project’s management insists this is not a museum, apparently worried that calling it one might frighten some people away. True, it does not have a permanent collection. And who doesn’t love a garden? Yet this elliptically named treasure is a museum all the same, and already an essential cultural destination by any definition.
Alexander Calder, born in 1898, was the son of one academic sculptor, Alexander Stirling Calder, and a grandson of another, Alexander Milne Calder. His father studied and taught at Philadelphia’s prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, where his mother, Nanette Lederer Calder, had been a student as well. The work of all three Calder men has been visible on Benjamin Franklin Parkway since 1965, when the youngest Calder’s huge white mobile The Ghost, made for his Guggenheim Museum retrospective the previous year, was acquired by the Philadelphia Art Museum and hung in its Great Stair Hall, where it remains. Through the large windows of that monumental space we can see his father’s Swann Memorial Fountain of 1924 at Logan Circle, midway along the parkway, and in the far distance his grandfather’s 1892 statue of William Penn atop the tower of City Hall.
Further extending the Calder genealogy in Philadelphia is Alexander Calder’s grandson Alexander Stirling Calder Rower, the president of the Calder Foundation and the prime mover of the new institution, which he chose to locate in the city where his family has deep roots. Rower, who goes by Sandy (which was also his grandfather’s nickname), has earned a reputation in the art world for litigiousness, though he sees his vigorous guardianship as necessary to protect his grandfather’s legacy. For example, during a Calder exhibition in 1998 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art removed small mobile-like objects by the artist Brad Howe from its gift shop at the behest of the Calder Foundation. Reportedly the Calder estate, then headed by Rower’s mother—the artist’s daughter Mary Calder Rower—feared that the public might think those tchotchkes were by the master himself, a strange assumption.
I had my own run-in with Rower in 1997, when he insisted that my introduction to my old friend Pedro E. Guerrero’s Calder at Home: The Joyous Environment of Alexander Calder, a book of his images of the sculptor’s workplaces, be pulled. I’d had the temerity to suggest—after I heaped praise on Calder as a supreme creative genius for the ages—that perhaps his late-life paintings and graphics were not of the same quality as his earlier sculptural efforts and regretted that he had decorated planes for Braniff International Airways in a 1973 commission titled Flying Colors. Although I took pains to emphasize that none of this diminished Calder’s stature, it wasn’t enough for his posthumous protector and promoter, and out my essay went from a book he had not commissioned but over which he exerted undue control.
At Calder Gardens, however, Rower is beyond reproach, save for one significant lapse: his decision to have no information about the artworks in the galleries. He is hardly alone in wanting to eliminate wall labels, an art world trend that in some cases is attributable to installation designers who don’t like having their pristine schemes cluttered with texts. One solution to this has been to provide information sheets that museumgoers can carry around with them or access on their electronic devices. Rower briskly told the Philadelphia public radio station WHYY, “Go to calder.org and we present so much grad-student-level information for people that want to dive down.” He sees the omission of on-site identifications as a boon to visitors. “My mission is not to interpret the work,” he told Philadelphia magazine.
And not to allow other people to interpret it for you. There’s nothing mitigating your experience. There’s nobody telling you what to think. That might be frustrating for some people who might want to know what the date is and what’s the title, but it’s not the purpose of this place because it’s not a museum. And there’s no exhibition. It’s just you being with a work of art.
Why, then, did Calder give very specific and evocative names to some of his creations? Although several works in the opening selection are untitled, there are stabiles called Tripes, Knobs, and Sword Plant, and, most impenetrably, a mobile-stabile hybrid that the artist dubbed Myxomatose (1953). It turns out that this is a reference to myxomatosis, a viral hemorrhagic disease that was killing rabbits on his French property, which is why the sculpture’s base resembles an inverted bunny head with two floppy ears.
That visitors to Calder Gardens might learn facts that motivated the artist is not mind control but a basic courtesy to the uninformed. Perhaps a reluctance to provide dates might have something to do with the widespread critical perception that Calder’s earlier work was on the whole superior to his later production, which was characterized by large-scale public commissions that were much more coarsely fabricated, often with the help of assistants, than the typically delicate, intimately proportioned early works he handcrafted himself.
A visitor’s first reaction upon arriving at Calder Gardens could well be, “Where’s the building?” This is partly owed to a melding of architecture and landscaping so deft that one wonders if Herzog & de Meuron made a close preliminary study of the oeuvre of Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, the underappreciated New York–based husband-and-wife architectural partnership whose remarkable feats of naturalistic integration have made them exemplars of that approach. Paradoxically, the couple’s self-effacing ethos—evident in public commissions such as Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park of 2009–2019 in Long Island City and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center of 2004–2012—has worked against their gaining superstar status because their designs often seem to vanish into the landscape, whereas many patrons want designs that attract attention.
Along with Oudolf’s horticultural camouflage, another reason for the invisibility of Herzog & de Meuron’s pavilion is its highly polished metal exterior, which does such a good job of reflecting its surroundings—both the plantings and a line of banal high-rise buildings in the near distance—that the structure is dematerialized to an astonishing degree. Ever since they founded their firm in Basel in 1978, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron—who were both born in that city in 1950, met as seven-year-old schoolmates, and went on to study architecture together at the ETH in Zurich—have paid close attention to the surface materials of their buildings. Although that fixation can at times seem like a fetish, their skin games are a reaction against International Style architects who drained much of the interest from their buildings’ exteriors by favoring a limited range of materials and colors.
During the first decade of Herzog & de Meuron’s practice, many of its peers fell for postmodernism’s advocacy of traditional motifs and multicolored exteriors as the way out of that creative dead end. The Swiss partners, by contrast, have employed a wide array of unconventional exterior treatments—everything from glass imprinted with repeat patterns of miscellaneous found photographs (the Eberswalde Technical School Library of 1994–1999 in Germany, a collaboration with the photographer Thomas Ruff) to crumpled aluminum mesh with the textured sheen of a Dacron matelassé bedspread (the misconceived Walker Art Center addition of 1999–2005 in Minneapolis).
In its choices of cladding, Herzog & de Meuron is also unusual for its concern with how materials age, and specifically the effect that the elements have on surfaces. This is in marked contrast to early European modernists’ use of light-colored stucco, which may have looked wonderful in the sunny Mediterranean communities where they first saw it but was unsuited to damp northern climates and needed frequent repainting. Similarly, the unfinished concrete that later became the defining material of Brutalist architecture was prone to damp staining and spalling. Rather than fighting these inevitabilities, the Swiss architects have embraced the reality of weathering and lapses in maintenance, and in several instances have specified materials that in due course will intentionally look different from their appearance upon completion.
For example, for the exterior of their de Young Museum of 1999–2005 in San Francisco, Herzog & de Meuron chose a perforated copper paneling that would slowly develop a green patina to make the building blend in with its verdant surroundings in Golden Gate Park. More radical is the firm’s studio of 1995–1996 for the artist Rémy Zaugg in Alsace: one blank oblong end wall of the single-story concrete structure is vertically streaked from its flat roof to the ground with the residue of yellow mineral deposits that were incorporated into the roofline to be washed down by rainwater. It’s doubtful that the immaculate, highly reflective finish of the Calder Gardens building can be sustained over time, and perhaps even the architects do not know what it will look like after several winters or prolonged exposure to exhaust fumes from the sunken Vine Street Expressway, which runs along the southern edge of the site.
Countering the looking-glass effect of the cladding is a pronounced peak-roofed metal canopy that extends laterally above the building’s façade and recalls Herzog & de Meuron’s Parrish Art Museum of 2009–2012 in Water Mill, New York, an extruded stretch of twin side-by-side linear concrete shelters with similar pointed roofs and overhanging eaves. The entry at Calder Gardens is almost perversely nondescript. The façade’s wood-paneled central portion is interrupted only by a single-pane square window that offers a glimpse down into the exhibition spaces below. At the far right of the loggia, shaded by the canopy, is the heavy wooden front door, excessive in its diffidence.
The underwhelming entry sequence continues into a small concrete-floored vestibule. Walls and ceilings are covered with finely milled hemlock reminiscent of a sauna at a luxury resort. This leads to a balcony with a sheet glass balustrade that looks down into the double-height Tall Gallery, and here the Alexander Calder that the public knows and loves bursts into view with a small, well-chosen selection of his work. Hanging from the ceiling is Black Widow (1948), an eleven-foot-tall mobile with nineteen biomorphic projections that suggests a buoyant Matisse cutout rather than a venomous arachnid. More menacing is the stabile below it, also titled Black Widow (1959), but like almost all of Calder’s stationary works it projects a playful-scary aura.
Visitors descend to a mezzanine via a flight of steps that adjoins a broad cascade of wooden bleachers similar to the people-watching perches that Diller Scofidio + Renfro has built into several of its projects, including the High Line. The circulation route then leads to a narrow, enclosed stairway with black-painted walls made of roughly textured sprayed concrete that give this transitional passageway the spooky aura of an amusement park haunted house. (It is also so dimly lit that one fears it is a safety hazard.)
On a landing where the steps shift at a right angle is a glass-fronted inset—called the Art Nook—within which lurks one of the installation’s most arresting pieces: Calder’s mobile Tentacles (1947). This attenuated white-painted sheet metal and wire construction floats mysteriously in its black-painted niche like some bizarre deep-sea creature. Although Calder Gardens will feature loans from other institutions as well as from the Calder Foundation on a rotating basis to encourage return visits, one hopes that this unimprovable conjunction of hypnotic artwork and inventive display will be retained in perpetuity.
Exiting from that crepuscular corridor, you enter the lower gallery level, an interconnected open-plan sequence of soaring spaces that allows for easy meandering in any order. Although scarcely a gaping art barn, this principal display floor affords views that encompass several works at once, as well as enclosed spaces that come as unexpected revelations. Among these is the Apse Gallery, tucked behind a curving wall and with a floor plan shaped like a lightbulb. Painted a pale neutral tone and indirectly illuminated by a thin, undulating vertical aperture, this serene enclosure serves as a virtual reliquary for Calder’s Eucalyptus (1940), a majestic mobile almost eight feet high made of thirteen black-painted leaflike segments that uncannily capture the curving, quivering foliage of that tree.
Another sequestered area is the Curve Gallery, which wraps around the glass-walled, open-roofed Sunken Garden, within which now stands an untitled stabile that Calder made in France in 1954. Reminiscent of a church ambulatory, at present the gallery contains several sculptures and is hung with Calder paintings and works on paper from the 1930s through the 1960s. These share an array of vaguely Surrealist motifs, but none of them equals the antic vitality of the artist’s sculptures, let alone the vastly more accomplished paintings of Joan Miró, who first met Calder in Paris in 1928 and struck up a friendship that lasted the rest of their lives. At the far end of this semicircular corridor is the Small Gallery, a conventional box that now contains a selection of artworks by Calder’s forebears.
Calder Gardens’ greatest strength is how faithfully the architecture channels the spirit of the artist it honors. A common complaint of museum architects today is that it is nearly impossible to predict the kinds of exhibition spaces that future directions in contemporary art will require, given the continuous emergence of innovative mediums deployed in unforeseen ways. This has prompted a profusion of undifferentiated interiors intended to be adaptable for any contingency but not ideal for anything. In contrast, Herzog & de Meuron had the luxury of knowing exactly the kind of works Calder Gardens would contain, enabling the firm’s senior design partner in charge of the project, Jason Frantzen, to devise spaces wholly sympathetic to their contents.
Although Herzog & de Meuron is best known for its largest works—which include the Beijing National Stadium of 2003–2008 (built for the 2008 Summer Olympics and familiarly known as the Bird’s Nest) and the 56 Leonard Street apartment tower of 2007–2017 in New York City (nicknamed the Jenga building because its off-kilter upper stories resemble the solids and voids in that block-stacking game)—Calder Gardens, though one of the firm’s smallest, is also among its finest. To say that art and architecture here fit together like hand in glove seems far too rote, for the element of surprise that recurs time and again as you move through it is artistic synergy at its most inspired.
English (US) · 