MAKING A MOVE

A new sanctuary on Philadelphia's Parkway brings the Calders home.

- ADAM GOPNIK

The Herzog & de Meuron building is designed to mirror the gardens around it.

Philadelphia has always had a brotherly weakness for artistic dynasties. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries came the Peales, with the patriarch Charles and his three painting sons, tellingly christened Raphaelle, Rembrandt, and Rubens. Then came the Morans, luminous nineteenth-century landscapists, among whom was a daughter, Elizabeth. Most famously, there are the Calders, grandfather, father, and son—all, confusingly, named Alexander—whose sculpted work has ornamented the city for more than a century. The elder Calder made the statue of William Penn that crowns City Hall, a monument that caps the city’s skyline—with a long-enforced rule that no building could rise above Billy Penn's hat—but is distinguished, too, for radiating the benevolent dignity of a man of peace rather than the anxious arrogance of a warrior. The next Calder created the beautiful “Fountain of the Three Rivers,” on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, with voluptuous allegorical figures of the Delaware, the Schuylkill, and the Wissahickon. Best known of all is the grandson, “Sandy” Calder, the master of the mobile and stabile, who until now has been only sporadically represented in his home town.

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.