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The Calders are everywhere in Philadelphia. Atop City Hall is a statue of the writer and theologian William Penn by Alexander Milne Calder (1894), which set the limit for the height of the city’s buildings until 1986. To the north west, his son Alexander Stirling Calder’s Swann Memorial Fountain in Logan Square (1924) uses large Native American figures to symbolise the city’s rivers. Nearby sits a work by his grandson Alexander Calder (the best known of the Calders), “Three Disks, One Lacking” (1968). Three generations of sculptors represented within a few blocks. Now, a little further to the north west of these along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway is Calder Gardens.
It might be useful to describe it as the city’s first museum dedicated to its most famous sculptor, but those involved with the project assiduously avoid the word “museum”. So what is it?
Alexander Calder at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1949 © Photograph by Herbert Gehr/ Life Magazine © 2025 Calder Foundation, New York/ARS, New York
It’s an odd hybrid: part garden, part sunken sculpture court, part cult art temple, it appears like a little shed on a mound alongside the massive neoclassical cultural buildings that dot the formal boulevard. You might wonder exactly where the $90mn spent on it went. Behind the meadow flowers and the earth berm it has very little presence. Even its walls are clad in reflective metal, more heat-mirage than a monument.
Yet this modest building is the work of Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, responsible for some of the biggest blockbuster cultural buildings of the past few decades — from London’s Tate Modern to Hong Kong’s M+ and the De Young Museum in San Francisco. So there is, of course, more than there seems.
Visitors enter the modest lobby by way of a gentle ascending slope through the meadow, planted by brilliant Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf. Inside, a landing looks down on to an exhibition space with a clerestory window and Calder’s “stabiles” — his name for the spidery steel abstract sculptures now so familiar in American public spaces. It is clear that everything here happens underground. There are two ways down: via a broad wooden stair with terraced seating on one side, or a dark, black-walled stair which feels like a tufa-lined passage to a wine cellar. One way is institutional, the other archaeological.
Calder Gardens, designed by Herzog & de Meuron © Calder Gardens, 2025. Photograph by Iwan Baan. Artwork by Alexander Calder © 2025 Calder
Excavating unexpected spaces has become a bit of a trademark for Herzog & de Meuron, from digging down deep into the Tate’s Turbine Hall in London and the cavernous concrete chambers of M+ in Hong Kong (revealing the tunnels of an underground train line) to their London Serpentine Pavilion of 2012 (with Ai Weiwei), where they revealed the foundations of previous pavilions on the site. That exercise suggests that there is no such thing as a tabula rasa in architecture; every site has its history. This scrubby vacant lot between two major arteries might seem to suggest otherwise.
Yet there was history here. This part of the city was destroyed when the Vine Street Expressway was driven through in the 1960s. In what Jacques Herzog calls a “Vestige Garden”, the lost grid is echoed in the orientation of an oversized raw concrete block which protrudes from a wall, the material almost geological in character. This sunken garden, two floors down from the entrance, governs the subterranean spaces while another courtyard resembling a Zen rock garden with a floor of loose gravel creates a counterpoint.
“It was a strange project,” Jacques Herzog tells me, “with no brief. It was almost more like an artwork with no one telling me what I should do when I woke up every morning.”
There are double-height galleries designed to accommodate Calder’s large works © Calder Gardens, 2025. Photograph by Tom Powel. Artwork by Alexander Calder © 2025 Calder
A new book of sketches of the design process (published by Hauser & Wirth) offers an intriguing insight into the development of the ideas, the dead ends and, critically, the doubt. At one point Herzog writes: “Whatever combinations of fragments we tried, the result was always an object sitting on the ground. I became aware that I did not like that form was so prominent for a project where the artworks should be in the foreground . . . Not form but space should be the driving factor in the architecture we were looking for.”
Architects talk a lot about space. Mostly nonsense. Here, though, you see one determined to avoid the tyranny of form and the objectness of architecture. The result is this strange ensemble: a wall, a barn and spaces excavated from the earth to relieve it of the responsibility of representation.
This approach arguably emerges from a mid-century modernist tradition — from the sunken sculpture garden of Washington DC’s Hirshhorn Museum (as well as the brutalist building itself) and the sunken plazas of New York, like 28 Liberty Street (formerly One Chase Manhattan Plaza) with its Isamu Noguchi sculpture court (both designed by architects SOM), and Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum (soon to be Sotheby’s). This was conceived as a new way of addressing the city, creating a more intimate realm removed from the street and traffic, but still visible and accessible. These sunken plazas created a contemporary archaeology, revealing their roots and making them hyper-public. But they were backed by towers. This is not.
Each space has its own character © Calder Gardens, 2025. Photograph by Tom Powel. Artwork by Alexander Calder © 2025 Calder
Calder mobile and stabile © Calder Gardens, 2025. Photograph by Tom Powel. Artwork by Alexander Calder © 2025 Calder
The subterranean spaces here are more secluded and there is no looming architectural presence, yet you still sense a continuity. Although there are no doors between the galleries, each one has a particular character. There are double-height galleries designed to accommodate Calder’s large mobiles and stabiles; nooks for more delicate pieces; concrete walls for canvases and drawings; even a curved space with a skylight reminiscent of a James Turrell Skyspace.
There are recesses too, one of which becomes a seat, a raw concrete niche in which visitors become both installation and viewer. The variety of spaces is intended in part to maintain a sense of surprise, in part to give curators a broader range of settings and atmospheres to respond to. The light is natural, very fine and varies sharply through the spaces so that, although underground, they feel lighter and breezier than many more conventional art spaces.
Natural light permeates the spaces © Calder Gardens, 2025. Photograph by Tom Powel. Artwork by Alexander Calder © 2025 Calder
One small apse is devoted to the work of the elder Calders, including a small model of William Penn and an incredible art nouveau figure by the middle Calder. But you will not find a label anywhere. There has been a deliberate rejection of the didactic and to instead allow visitors experience the art on its own terms. There are no biographies, no themes. The works will rotate, drawing from the Calder Foundation’s huge collection and other institutions. Frankly, you don’t really miss it.
At the moment the meadows are still scrubby and there is something stark and curious about this new presence set so deliberately back from the axis of classical monuments. In its lack of public presence, Calder Gardens is everything that the more self-conscious icons of the art world are not. Enigmatic, self-effacing and quirky, it looks like the work of an architect who has little left to prove, built to display the work of an artist who was always also an engineer. It doesn’t pretend to resolve anything.
caldergardens.org
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