Calder Gardens – Herzog de Meuron
Philadelphia is Calder’s birth city and was the home of two previous generations of Calders who, as artists, left their own impressions on the city. Their sculptures can be found along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, a boulevard that is a product of the 19th century ‘city beautiful’ movement and is anchored by two of America’s most remarkable museums, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Barnes Foundation. Cutting across this Parkway is the sunken Vine Street Expressway which, like many of its counterparts in other American cities, sliced through the existing city fabric in the mid-20th century. Calder Gardens is located at the intersection of these two significant streets.
The site of Calder Gardens is a flat, tapered piece of land located across the broad Parkway from the Rodin Museum and the Barnes Foundation. A highway offramp extends along its long southern edge while 22nd Street to the west and 21st Street to the east are primarily used as vehicular throughways. Despite its central location, the site is a leftover space without much obvious charm. The sound of the highway is always present, and few people have had reason to walk through the site. Creating a destination within this urban void was a central challenge for the project.
Form, color, and movement are the most obvious aspects in Calder’s art. When the concept for Calder Gardens was conceived, it sought to avoid rather than adopt the use of these characteristics as possible design elements. Likewise, the design avoids the monumental architecture of the already impressive collection of museums which line the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. With these parameters in mind, it was decided that the face of this project should not be a building. Instead, it is a garden with a building within that reveals itself step by step as a series of distinct, heterotopic spaces.
