ROXBURY, CONN.- The future of Calder Gardens, a Philadelphia cultural project that is scheduled to open in early 2024, was being planned on a sunny day in June here on the lush Litchfield County estate where famed sculptor Alexander Calder once lived and worked.
This is where Alexander S.C. Rower, Calder’s grandson and the president of the Calder Foundation, met Piet Oudolf, the Dutch landscape designer known for his work on New York City’s High Line. They went over the $70 million project, the design of which will be announced Wednesday.
Calder Gardens, as the renderings show, will be jewel-box in scale and an untraditional art space in many ways, more of an oasis than a shiny new attraction.
“A garden can move you, like art can, in an emotional way,” said Oudolf, who is designing a plan for the 1.8-acre Calder Gardens site on Benjamin Franklin Parkway between 21st and 22nd streets.
His landscaping will surround an 18,000-square-foot, shedlike building designed by Pritzker Prize-winning firm Herzog & de Meuron that tucks its primary exhibition spaces underground.
Calder (1898-1976) was a Philadelphia native whom the city’s philanthropists have long wanted to honor. When he was in his 30s, he began creating his first moving sculptures, which Marcel Duchamp called mobiles. His brightly colored twisting mobiles and gracefully hulking stabiles made him a titan of 20th-century art, often imitated but never equaled. Calder’s prices at auction topped out at $25.9 million at Christie’s in 2014 for “Poisson volant (Flying Fish),” a mobile with a long, puzzle-like animated tail, made in 1957.
But the new structure is not a museum.
“I was approached by a group from Philadelphia saying they wanted to do something for Calder and I said, ‘Great, but I don’t want to do a museum,’” Rower said. “That’s too old-fashioned, too 19th-century.”
He added, “I’d rather do a place that’s meant for introspection, where you can be with art.”
Calder Gardens will show works from the foundation in long-term installations, rather than frequently rotating shows. (“We’re not doing ‘Calder in Paris’,” Rower said.)
It will face the Rodin Museum and the Barnes Foundation across the parkway, the city’s main cultural artery. The Barnes will have a hand in running Calder Gardens through an operating agreement that will merge their administrative functions. (Calder Gardens is set up as an independent nonprofit with its own endowment and board of trustees. Rower and the Calder Foundation will oversee the art curation, and Calder Gardens will hire its own staff, too.)
“We’ll realize so many efficiencies doing it this way,” said Thomas Collins, the Barnes’ executive director and president. “It will be very collaborative,” he added, but Calder Gardens “will have its own brand identity and curatorial identity.”
The project “celebrates a Philadelphia story,” Collins said. Proof of the family’s deep roots is lined up at various points on the parkway.
Calder’s grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, sculpted the figure of William Penn (circa 1886-94) atop City Hall, and his father, Alexander Stirling Calder, designed the Swann Memorial Fountain (1924) at Logan Circle. Calder himself created the mobile “Ghost” (1964) that hangs in a grand hall at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The artist had a sense of humor about the weight of the legacy as reflected in those three works. “So now they say that they have ‘the Father, the Son and the Unholy Ghost,’ or words to that effect,” Calder once quipped.
The site for the future Calder Gardens, now an empty lot, is the “missing tooth in a beautiful mouth,” said Joseph Neubauer, the Philadelphia philanthropist who is the project’s prime mover.
The Neubauer Family Foundation gave an estimated quarter of the funding for Calder Gardens and Neubauer coordinated substantial gifts from benefactors, including the Pew Charitable Trusts and the estate of H.F. Lenfest, who was known as Gerry, a key donor behind the Barnes’ 2012 expansion and move (as was Neubauer, his friend).
A trustee of the Barnes, Neubauer particularly wanted to ensure that Calder Gardens could afford programming once it gets built. “I don’t build anything without an endowment,” he said of the $20 million set aside for that purpose, with the remaining $50 million of the total cost going to construction.
Although the building planned for Calder Gardens is small by the standards of Herzog & de Meuron’s cultural projects — which include the de Young Museum, part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and an addition to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis — the firm’s co-founder, Jacques Herzog, was eager to take on Calder Gardens.
“It’s a gigantic project for me, in terms of the intensity,” Herzog said of his feelings about Calder as an artist and the new structure’s value. And, partly because of his respect for Calder, he did not try to compete with the master.
“Calder worked so much with volume and form and color, that’s all of what I wanted to avoid,” he said.
So Herzog and his team went with a shedlike structure clad in subtle reflective metal that will act as an entrance portal and sit above the more expansive underground galleries.
“We use a barn because it’s a kind of a non-object object,” he said, adding that it was an “innocent” building type.
Given the limited acreage, “you have to go underground,” Herzog said. Directly under the barn is a double-height gallery, and the other art spaces will be varied, united by their lack of right angles. Works will also spill over into stairwells and other unconventional locations. There will be two below-grade outdoor spaces, the Sunken Garden and the Vestige Garden.
Herzog said he was happy with the choice of Oudolf because “he’s the least architect-y landscape architect. He’s about the plants.”
A discussion of flora was certainly invited by the Connecticut estate setting, some 300 acres including land owned by the Calder Foundation and the Calder family, with one huge sculpture by Calder on a green lawn and another in a field.
The sculptor and his wife, Louisa James Calder, bought the first parcel and house here in 1933. His studios became his primary work spaces, and their home attracted surrealists and other creative types living in Connecticut. The family continued to winter in New York City until the late 1940s, and later bought a house in France’s Loire Valley and made it their primary residence.
Oudolf and Rower toured Calder’s charming studio, a former dairy barn, which was full of the artist’s rustic old tools and a few sculptures. Calder would have a soft-boiled egg every morning before going to the studio and engineering his large works. From the rafters he created his own pulley system, to hoist mobiles or canvases.
Oudolf, based in Hummelo, the Netherlands, may rank as the world’s most famous landscape designer, and he is particularly known for his work with perennial grasses. He was in the Northeast for just two days, with part of that time spent checking up on the High Line.
Oudolf explained the primary components of his Calder Gardens plan for Philadelphia: It will have a meadow-like matrix (his term for a wild-looking variety that does not seem designed) called the Parkway Garden, a block planting (similar flora grouped together) and hanging plants for the Sunken Garden.
“The main garden will make you feel you’re in a wild meadow, with a lot of American native plants,” he said.
His work, he said, was distinguished by its progression. “There’s a narrative, with chapters.”
But Oudolf has said this may be his last U.S. project. “I’m almost 78,” he said. “I want to wind down from all the stress and responsibility.”
When Rower mentioned from across the table that his grandparents adored bougainvilleas, he seemed to be floating the idea to see Oudolf’s reaction about whether they would work in Calder Gardens.
Oudolf tried hard to look polite as he said that although he liked them, “They can be a cliché.”
When a reporter gingerly suggested delphiniums instead, Oudolf looked relieved.
“Well, delphiniums!” he said. “There you are. We would do some of the smaller flowering ones. America has some good species we could put in a meadow.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
