The Sunday Times Frank Gehry's Plans for the Philadelphia Museum

The Sunday Times Frank Gehry’s plans for the Philadelphia Museum of Art Published: December 31, 2017 by Jeremy Melvin The architect is famous for the flashy exterior of the Bilbao Guggenheim—but his latest museum project will be all but invisible In 2002, Frank Gehry went with his friend the artist Ellsworth Kelly to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The art world was still buzzing over Gehry’s spectacular Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, completed five years earlier. So when the director, Anne d’Harnoncourt, recognised the stellar pair in her galleries, she went to greet them. “You’ve done this amazing thing in Bilbao,” Gehry remembers her saying. “Could you be interested in doing something where nothing will be seen on the outside?” D’Harnoncourt knew that however forbidding her “temple of art” seemed from the exterior, it had many hidden qualities and enormous unused spaces. These might provide the galleries, education facilities, shops and cafes that museums need in the 21st century. Exploiting them, though, would mean overcoming the barriers between viewers and exhibits that the great neoclassical museums can imply. The Sunday Times At Philadelphia, this is especially difficult, reflects Timothy Rub, who became director after d’Harnoncourt’s untimely death in 2008. The museum is set on a hill that “falls away quickly in all directions”, so, unlike New York’s Metropolitan or the Art Institute of Chicago, it could not expand, perhaps with radically different architecture, into a surrounding park. The only scope for alteration was internal, so something other than the magic of flamboyantly crinkly titanium-clad forms that made Bilbao so striking was needed. The 88-year-old Gehry explains the difference between these two approaches by delving back into his lifelong engagement with cultural activity. “I grew up looking at art,” he recalls; he regularly visited galleries and concert halls with his mother. The interest continued when he moved from Toronto to Los Angeles as a young man. Working as a truck driver and studying at night, he was “extremely poor”, but “by some miracle” got into architecture school. He took some time to develop a distinctive approach to architecture, though over the years often discussed with friends the sort of architecture that best suited their generation of artists. Gehry had assumed artists would want neutral spaces that downplayed architectural character, but they felt that would have a “negative impact on their work”. The Louvre, he remembers them arguing, may not seem suited to their kind of art, but it brought “cultural acceptance” and set the “tenor of discussion”. For artists stretching the limits of artistic convention, this sort of context was important because it put their work into a familiar space for viewing art. The Bilbao Guggenheim’s curatorial and popular success radically changed the scope of gallery design. For some time before it opened in 1997, most new galleries were recessive to the point of anonymity, or appropriated disused industrial buildings to avoid overt architectural input, like the original Saatchi Gallery and Tate Modern. Bilbao showed that architecture could do much more than provide space for viewing art: it could forge new connections between art, the public, a city and a region. Nowhere was this idea more piquant than in Philadelphia. Completed in 1928 to designs by the firm of Horace Trumbauer, a favourite of the Philly plutocracy (with significant input from Julian Abele, one of the first African-American architects), the Philadelphia Museum of Art is detached from its urban context by a forbidding flight of 72 steps — the ones that Rocky Balboa, Sylvester Stallone’s fictional blue-collar Philadelphian, famously runs up with a horde of fans in tow. Rocky dances on the The Sunday Times terrace, rather than leading this gang into the museum. Gehry wants to encourage them to go in, with the aim of boosting visitors from 800,000 to 1m a year. The museum does, after all, have a magnificent collection of post-impressionists and one of the largest stashes of Duchamp’s work, as well as American art of the past 300 years. Gehry recalls trying to understand the latent possibilities that Trumbauer had put into the design. He found a magnificent barrel-vaulted walkway running the full length of the museum at a low level. Intended as a public concourse, with an entrance that avoided the steps, it had been taken out of the circulation route when a new art-handling bay blocked its entrance, and a new auditorium cut it off from the main entrance hall above. Reopening this walkway and connecting it back to the museum’s public spaces became a priority. That meant creating another art-handling bay and removing the auditorium. The first was already on the agenda, part of a long list of technical and operational priorities to bring the museum’s security and climate control up to 21st-century standards. The second might be a trickier proposition, Gehry thought. But the logic of restoring the walkway became compelling, because it offered the possibility of connecting the museum to the city, and its public transport, at street level. Two separate entrance halls could be amalgamated into a public forum at the heart of the museum; even more important, public space on the lower level could lead naturally into the area under the steps. The plan is to remove Rocky’s steps, excavate the volume to create galleries with more height and light for displaying contemporary art, then replace the steps. This first phase is scheduled for completion in 2020. Just as Gehry demonstrated in the face of received opinion at Bilbao that architecture had an active part to play in the experience of viewing art, so he shows at Philadelphia how latent qualities in apparently outmoded buildings can be drawn out to meet contemporary expectations. As he puts it: “As long as art, culture and beauty happen, we’ll play.” .

Load more