ROXBURY, Connecticut — The Future Calder GardensSlated to open in early 2024, the Philadelphia cultural project is planned for a sunny day in June at the leafy Litchfield County mansion where famed sculptor Alexander Calder once lived and worked. I was.
Here is Alexander SC Lower, Calder’s grandson and president. Calder Foundation,met Pete Oudolfis a Dutch landscape designer known for his work on New York City’s High Line. They’re moving forward with his $70 million-plus project, the design of which was unveiled Wednesday.
As the renderings show, Calder Gardens is a jewel box of scale and in many ways a non-traditional art space, more of an oasis than a shiny new attraction.
“Gardens can move you in emotional ways, just like art can,” says Calder Gardens, the 1.8-acre property between 21st and 22nd Streets on Benjamin Franklin Parkway. said Oudolf, who is designing plans for
His landscaping surrounds an 18,000-square-foot cabin-like building designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning firm. Herzog & de Meuron Tuck the main exhibition space underground.
Calder (1898-1976) was a Philadelphia native long wanted to be celebrated by the city’s philanthropists. In his thirties, he began producing the first moving sculptures, which Marcel Duchamp called mobiles.his brightly colored twist cell phone And the gracefully huge stables made him a giant of 20th century art. Calder’s price at auction reached $25.9 million in 2014 at Christie’s. “Poisson Volant (flying fish)” 1957 puzzle-like animated long-tailed mobile.
But the new building is not a museum.
“A group in Philadelphia contacted me and said they wanted to do something for Calder. I said, ‘Great, but I don’t want to do a museum,'” said Lower, the artist’s grandson. . “It’s so dated and 19th century.”
He added, “I want to create a place where you can be with art, for introspection.”
Calder Gardens presents the Foundation’s work in long-term installations rather than frequent rotations. (“We’re not doing ‘Calder in Paris,'” Rower said.)
Rodin Museum and Barnes Foundation Across the Parkway, the city’s main cultural artery. The Barnes will be involved in the operation of Calder Gardens through an operating agreement that will consolidate administrative functions. (Calder Gardens was established as an independent nonprofit with its own endowment and board of directors. Rower and the Calder Foundation oversee the curation of his art, and Calder Gardens also employs its own staff. )
“There are so many efficiencies going into doing it this way,” he said. Thomas Collins Executive Director and President of Burns. “It’s going to be a very collaborative one,” he added, but Calder Gardens “will have its own brand identity and curatorial identity.”
The project “is a celebration of the Philadelphia story,” says Collins. The proof of the family’s roots is lined up in various places on the parkway.
Calder’s grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, sculpted the statue of William Penn (c. 1886-1894) above City Hall, and his father, Alexander Sterling Calder, designed the Swan Memorial Fountain (1924) at Logan Circle Did.Calder himself created the mobile phone “ghost” (1964) hangs in the Great Hall of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The artist had a sense of humor about the weight of his legacy, as reflected in these three works of his. “So now they say they have ‘Fathers and Sons and Wicked Ghosts,’ or say words to that effect,” Calder once quipped.
Philadelphia philanthropist and project driving force Joseph Neubauer says the future Calder Garden site, now vacant, is “a lost tooth in a beautiful mouth.”
The Neubauer Family Foundation donated an estimated quarter of the funds to Calder Gardens, with Neubauer coordinating a large donation from its patrons. Pew Charitable Trust and the estate of HF Renfest, known as Gerry (as was his friend Neubauer), a major donor behind Barnes’ 2012 expansion and move.
Burns’ trustee, Neubauer, especially wanted to have some spare time to do programming after Calder Gardens was built. “I wouldn’t build anything without funds,” he said of his $20 million set aside for that purpose, the rest of his $50 million of the total cost being spent on construction. rice field.
The planned building for Calder Gardens is small by the standards of Herzog & de Meuron’s cultural projects. De Young Museumpart of the San Francisco Museum of Art, and Walker Art Center IN MINNEAPOLIS — Company co-founder Jack Herzog was keen to try Calder Gardens.
“It’s a huge project for me in terms of intensity,” Herzog said of his feelings about Calder as an artist and the value of the new structure. And out of respect for Calder, he didn’t try to compete with the Master.
“Calder was very focused on volume, form and color, and that’s all I wanted to avoid,” he said.
So Herzog and his team employed a hut-like structure clad in subtle reflective metal that acts as an entrance portal and sits above a larger underground gallery.
“We use a barn because it’s like an object that isn’t an object,” he said, adding that it’s a “harmless” building type.
Given the limited area, “We have to go underground,” says Herzog. Just below the barn is a gallery twice his height, and other art his spaces vary and are united by the lack of right angles. The work also spills over into stairwells and other unconventional locations. In the basement are his two outdoor spaces, the Sunken Garden and the Vestige Garden.
Herzog says he is happy with Oudolf’s choice. He’s about plants. “
The discussion about plants was certainly invited by the Connecticut real estate setting. About 300 acres of land, including land owned by the Calder Foundation and the Calder family, had a giant sculpture of Calder, one of him on a green lawn, and another of his in a field.
Sculptor and wife Louisa James Calder purchased the first lot and home here in 1933. His studio became his primary working space, and their home attracted surrealists and other creative types living in Connecticut. The family wintered in New York City until his late 1940s, after which he purchased a home in the Loire Valley in France, where it became his primary residence.
Oudolf and Rower toured Calder’s charming studio, a former dairy farm, which was filled with the artist’s rustic old tools and some sculptures. Calder would eat a soft-boiled egg every morning before going to the studio to design a big piece. He created his own pulley system from rafters to lift mobiles and canvases.
Based in Hummelo, the Netherlands, Ördruf may be ranked among the world’s most famous landscape designers, and is especially known for his work with perennials. The only time he was in the Northeast he was two days, and part of that time was spent checking the High Line.
Oudolf described the main components of Philadelphia’s Calder Gardens plan as follows: It has a meadow-like matrix (his term for wild varieties that seem undesigned) called Parkway Garden. Sunken garden block planting (grouping similar plants together) and hanging his plants.
“The main garden makes you feel like you’re in a wild meadow full of native American plants,” he said.
His work, he said, was distinguished by its progress. “I have a story with chapters.”
However, Udolph said this may be his last American project. “I’m almost 78,” he said. “I want to be free of all stress and responsibility.”
When Rower told him from across the table that his grandparents loved bougainvillea, he seemed to want to see Oudolf’s reaction to whether his grandparents would work at Calder Gardens.
Udolph said he liked them but tried very hard to appear polite, saying that “they can be clichéd.”
Udolf seemed relieved when the reporter cautiously recommended Delphinium.
“Hmm, delphinium!” he said. “There it is. I’ll make some that have little flowers. There are some good seeds in America that you can plant in your pasture.”