Reflections of a Walker--Three Up, Three Down

Three up, three down. My after-dinner routine, 5-6 nights a week. We're talking the Rocky Steps, so roundtrip, that's 426 steps in all, not counting the long landings. I used to bring my music along, but lately, I go unplugged, to better hear what's in my head.

Steps are a metaphor for life. Steps are work done, effort expended, reward gained, new highs, interminable plateaus, repetition, repetition, religion, progress, process, meditation and more. From antiquity, we've climbed steps to seek absolution, gain power and worship gods.

These particular steps lead to Philadelphia's Art Museum, "the Parthenon of the Parkway," a temple to art. A quick, keylike turn around the fountain reveals the glittering city in expanse, at its feet. My neighborhood, Fairmount, predates the Museum's construction by a good two centuries. William Penn had originally planned to put his manor house here on the neighborhood's most prominent point. I am so spoiled, having six, now seven museums in a ten minute walk. Two of them are literally at my feet, across the street from my house.

This particular night, I did not veer across Pennsylvania Avenue, rather I stayed on it, skirting Mark di Suvero's "Iroquois," another of my favorite nightly visual markers, seen here photographed by Inquirer alumni and friend Eric Mencher. My evening peregrinations had another destination, the newest and most controversial of our "art temples," the home of the new Barnes Collection. My nocturnal crawl had become an "arts reconnaissance."

Much has been said about this building--not all of it complimentary, some of this naysaying dished by yours truly.  I called it second-class, dowdy and unworthy of its prominent place on the Parkway, Philadelphia's museum mile, which, did I mention, I am privileged to live at the crown of?

I compared The Barnes unfavorably with the Phoenix Museum of Art (same architects--Tod Williams and Billie Tsien) and wondered if it was something of an architectural slight on my people and place.  When I wrote my piece, an architect friend admonished me to keep a close eye and an open mind. So I did. I have watched The Barnes grow from a hole in the ground. Though I'm not entirely won over, lately a new notion has taken hold of me which I'm finding increasingly hard to shake.

I am not an architect or an architectural critic. But being a visual artist, living smack in the midst of a city where dramatic structures rise up with some regularity makes it hard to be neutral or ambivalent to your surroundings. You take sides. You form attachments. You walk the beat and research with your eyes, ears and feet. So, what I've been grappling with is the idea that perhaps The Barnes is not an architectural mediocrity after all. Quite possibly, it is a work of subtle and compelling genius.

The first clue came in my regular walks along the Parkway. Heading NW. I noticed that the landscapers had replanted damaged or dead sycamores, so standing together, new trees and old, present a strong, symmetrical line along between the avenue and the museum. Cool, I thought, they replanted the same trees.

As a walker, I'm an unapologetic tree-hugger by nature and Philadelphia's stately mottle-trunked sycamores are like old friends and guardians. They have rapidly become my favorite tree. They are hardy and endure the less than optimal urban ecosystem. They endure and look pretty doing so.

But this isn't just about the trees as I soon discovered. For as long as the sun occupies the southwest sky, the trees cast their long columnar shadows on the mottled slab face the Barnes presents to the NW or SE traveler.

Everywhere you look up and down the Parkway, you see columns. It's like Athens by the Schuylkill. The Barnes has no columns.  But The Barnes, from mid-afternoon to near sunset, does have "tree-shadow" columns. At first I dismissed this trompe l'oeil as accidental, or at best a happy accident. But then I noticed that the building's stone face already seems to have weathered in pleasing organic patterns reminiscent of sycamore bark. The more I pass it, the more convinced I become of the delicate, deliberate hand of the architect. And if this is so, how clever is that?

Just yesterday, they lowered the "Barnes Totem" into place.  News of this is what drove tonight's detour in the first place.


The abstract sculpture is an Ellsworth Kelly piece and it too had drawn some flack.  Daily News reporter and Fairmount neighbor Ronnie Polaneczky snickered at it. Now I love Ronnie's scrappy, no-nonsense reportage, but like any Joe Cheesesteak citizen, I am entitled to my own opinion. So for the first time, I circumnavigated the entire museum. It was impossible to get on the grounds after closing time, but it was all plainly visible.  Having made a ten-to-nine circle around the grounds, I came up to the main entrance at five-o'clock, where for the first time I saw that Kelly's totem is itself, a columnar commentary.

At the entrance on 20th street, the walkway spills wide, presenting a serene, public expanse which draws the pedestrian right up close to the museum without ever obliging one to enter. The Rodin, a somewhat second rate collection, is nonetheless beautifully landscaped and so, engages travelers the same way. It beckons the foot traveler closer, invites one to enter or just enjoy and be aware of its presence in transit. I'm convinced we are incrementally enriched, even when we just travel past museums.

Much also has been made of the curious rectilinear saltbox atop of The Barnes. At first it looked like pipe, tent and drapework that you might encounter at a big tradeshow booth, but as I passed it last night, its translucent, ethereal glow "transported" me. I imagined the ghosts of Impressionists swimming in a pale Zoetrope, their spectral outlines beckoning beyond the light-permeable walls for the world to see and marvel at.

There is no stronger critic of the bland reliance on traditional building materials than me. Why, when modern science brings us so many durable marvels of metal, plastic polymer and glass, do architects and builders so unimaginatively default to brickface and stoneface as materials of choice? Especially here in Philadelphia. The bland, monotonous, recently erected science and medical complexes in West Philadelphia are so last century! So is the Kimmel. So are a dozen other new high-rises. However, the translucency of The Barnes chapeau and its luminous engagement with the exterior score yet another quiet but significant coup for Philadelphia architecture.

“It’s both incredibly exciting and really sort of frightening because it’s such a loaded package,” Ms. Tsien said in this 2007 New York Times interview after being awarded the commission. “How can you do something interesting and how can you bring new life when the boundaries are so strictly drawn?”

How indeed? My estimation of the architects' vision has risen meteorically. I think they may have accidentally, or more likely with wise and deliberate intent, pulled this one off. If so, I tip my walker's hat to them. From LA to NYC, critics have had a field day with the new Barnes at every phase of its construction. They are all more learned and worthy critics than I, but none have had the opportunity to walk past it three-four times a week for five years and absorb all that unfolds, as it unfolds. I tell you, the place grows on you. I think the rest of the world may just have to wait and absorb what I've experienced to see the genius that went into it. I may be wrong, but my gut tells me I'm not. This just may be Philadelphia's greatest building, not because of its own (not so) striking visage, but more for the modest but no less important inclusiveness of what it reflects of and transmits to the city and its people. And if this is so, its philosophy is a stark and triumphant departure from the past.

Barnes Foundation founder Albert Coombs Barnes

The Barnes Foundation has been a troubled steward of a renowned collection of impressionist, post-impressionist, and early modernist work. Its new home will open on May 19, my son's 18th birthday. The gallery had resided in Lower Merion since the 1920s, where visitation was restricted both by (deliberately vindictive) design and destination. Some commentators see a silver lining in this exclusivity. I do not. The collection has languished because of the choices of its uber-mercurial founder/collector. There are plenty of discussions about Barnes, his battles with the art world and the legacy he left.

Perhaps after all the dust has settled, what is needed in a new home is a tabula rasa upon which to project the collection's quirky greatness. Perhaps the new Barnes is just that home—a domicile built with the most unpretentious of pretensions—to understate itself and in so doing, embrace the city, reflect our aspirations and draw us in to a serene setting where the magnificent collection will find room to breathe, settle in and reveal itself to the world beyond Lower Merion.  If so, the building's design shows a subtlety and sophistication of thought that is both admirable and groundbreaking.

I continued my walk up the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, full of anticipation for the coming months. Then I did my three up/three down. We all have rituals to which we're obliged and indebted. As a pedestrian, I'm a big believer in going "as the crow flies," but sometimes an inspired detour is exactly what's required to reach your destination.