In Philadelphia’s Calder Gardens, a Dynasty Comes Home
That’s meant to be remedied by Calder Gardens, a new institution taking shape in a half-buried berm on the Parkway, not far from that paternal fountain. The site joins a civic row of culture—the Franklin Institute (science), the Free Library (books), the Rodin Museum (tormented figures), and the Barnes (eccentric juxtapositions of modern art and Pennsylvania Dutch ironwork). At the top of the drive, a Greek-temple art museum presides, its most recent cultural icon—Sylvester Stallone as Rocky—tactfully tucked out of sight.
Though the gardens honor the full Calder lineage, their focus is on the twentieth-century inheritor. They avoid the trap of the monographic mausoleum—the now familiar single-artist shrine that can make the work feel lonely in its completeness rather than alive in its variety. Herzog & de Meuron has designed a deliberately “irrational” exhibition space, set largely below the Parkway and sheathed in reflecting steel, so that the building vanishes into air (as architects like to say), mirroring the gardens around it rather than asserting its own profile. Those gardens, intended to be untamed, animating, and informal, are the work of Piet Oudolf, the creator of the High Line plantings, in New York. Though unfinished on a recent Monday visit, the gardens already promise to grow into wild abundance.
As one enters and descends, the space unfolds in a purposefully whimsical range of materials. Volcanic-seeming black rock lines a catacomblike stairway, punctuated by a single glass window framing a lone Calder. Tiered seats lead down into a viewing area that doubles as an amphitheatre for lectures or performances. Though buried, the sometimes monumental forms of the exhibition space rise convexly, lifting upward, while light from the Parkway pours in through floor-to-ceiling windows. Even underground, one feels enlarged, not entombed. And there’s nothing tomblike about the constant rumble of traffic from the boulevard outside.
The Calder legacy is well represented today by Alexander S. C. Rower, the current holder of the Sandy moniker (he’s a Calder on his mother’s side), who welcomed visitors to the new site by confessing that he had once thought of calling it a “hypogeum”—a term for a subterranean temple or chamber. “I don’t mean an altar to my grandfather,” he quickly added, “but a place for reflection and reconnection to essence. Not a house of relics, not a memorial. A sacred space for self-cultivation.” In his sixties and taut with nervous energy, Sandy Rower knew his grandfather well and had been welcome in the studio—so long as he, too, was at work. (“Not on homework!” he said. “If you were working with your hands, it was O.K. You could make a sword!”) He now tries to carry his grandfather’s vision forward to members of the next generation, introducing them to an art multivalent and unfixed, that moves to open minds. Leading his visitors through the new installation, he treats it less as the museum it is not intended to be—or even the “cultural space” it advertises itself as—than as an underground menagerie of eccentric animals, each with a temperament of its own. The mobiles are Rower’s untamable creatures, swinging close to heads, shaking and shimmering unpredictably. He delights in their waywardness with the proud wariness of a zookeeper showing off his exotic charges.
“I love to dispel the bizarre things that people make up about my grandfather,” Rower said, among them the claim that the mobiles were engineered. “When he was a boy, my grandfather grew up with a studio in his father’s studio, and he had an intuitive sense of engineering. And then, later, his parents didn’t want him to suffer as an artist does, his father being a sculptor and his mom a painter. A friend was going to study mechanical engineering at Stevens Institute—but that program was to teach you to be an executive. You learned some engineering. So his ‘engineering’ background can be overstated. In any case, he said he would have made mobiles without engineering at all. None of these are ‘engineered’ objects. The outdoor works, yes, become engineered for safety and ribs and structure, but they’re always governed by aesthetic choices.”
