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For many years, visitors to the Whitney Museum on New York’s Upper East Side could discover and delight in a fragile, circus-themed sculpture by one of America’s greatest modern artists, Alexander Calder (1898-1976). Something of a rite of passage for New Yorkers and visitors to the city, such initial encounters with Calder’s Circus were followed by expectations of meeting again an old friend within the concrete and stone monolith by the Bauhaus-trained master architect, Marcel Breuer.
Sixty years later – the Whitney having vacated its custom-designed premises and relocated to a more capacious building by Renzo Piano Building Workshop – the original Breuer building will soon reopen for the Sotheby’s auction house with a subtle reworking by Herzog & de Meuron. About 150 km to the south, in Philadelphia, the same Swiss practice has now completed one of its more surprising new projects: an exhibition venue dedicated to the work and legacy of Calder, a native of Philadelphia and the third generation of sculptors in the Calder family.
The new project’s name, Calder Gardens, indicates that this is not a traditional museum or memorial. The building is essentially underground, interred and blanketed by a sea of wildflowers courtesy of the Dutch “plantsman” Piet Oudolf. Known already in the United States for his contributions to the High Line in New York City and Millennium Park in Chicago, Oudolf has here allowed nature return to an unorthodox urban site between the busy Vine Street Expressway to the south and the majestic Benjamin Franklin Parkway, a formal Beaux Arts avenue, on higher ground to the north.
This unusual context, between the banal and the grand, as reliant on infrastructure and engineering as on City Beautiful urban design, is home to Herzog & de Meuron’s latest intervention in the United States. It is signaled to joggers and promenaders on the Parkway by a...
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