WHERE PIET MET CALDER

The legendary Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf lets his plantings speak for him. As the Calder Gardens opens in Philadelphia, he gives a rare interview.

- SPENCER BAILEY

Oudolf's focus on plants is one reason architect Jacques Herzog collaborated with him on the Calder Gardens. "He's not obsessed with doing benches." Opposite: Oudolf creates colorful hand-drawn plans.

One day in 2018, Alexander “Sandy” Rower, the grandson of the artist and sculptor Alexander Calder and president of the Calder Foundation, received a call from the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. The leadership of the Barnes—which had successfully moved its 4,000-artwork collection a decade earlier from Merion, Pennsylvania, to a new building on Benjamin Franklin Parkway—was keen to bring a Calder museum to Calder’s hometown. “I said, ‘I really appreciate the call, but I don’t want to make a museum,’” Rower recalls. “I’d like to make a sanctuary.”

After a few months of back and forth with the Barnes team, things began to click. Joseph Neubauer, then the chair of the Barnes board, “really understood what I was saying,” Rower says. The Swiss-based firm Herzog & de Meuron was selected for the architecture. Plans were swiftly falling into place. But if it wasn’t going to be a museum, what to call it? Through what Rower calls a “soul-searching effort,” the architect Jacques Herzog, along with Thomas Collins, the executive director of the Barnes, landed on a solution: Calder Gardens.