"Halfway along its length, this silvery barrier flips up, recalling the lid of a giant laptop, forming an entrance canopy that beckons you inside. As you ascend the planted knoll, you find great furrows gouged into the ground, jagged concrete sinkholes from which the peaks of colourful sculptures protrude. Welcome to Calder Gardens, an otherworldly place conceived by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron to celebrate the work of Philadelphia-born Alexander Calder, master of mobiles."
"It is one of the strangest cultural complexes to be built anywhere in recent years. On an unpromising site no larger than a football pitch, wedged between two highways, a beguiling sequence of spaces take visitors on a journey of discovery deep into the ground. It is part barn, part cave and part rolling meadow, compressing a whole universe of different gallery types into one compact encounter."
"It seems very much tuned to our age of spectacle the camp stagey quality can verge on Disneyish I have never worked on anything like this before, says 75-year-old Jacques Herzog, who has created numerous museums and galleries around the world, often reinventing the type each time. There was literally no brief. I felt like an artist, waking up every morning without someone telling me what to do. Architecture is never this free."
Calder Gardens occupies a narrow plot beside highways in Philadelphia, marked by a shimmering metallic wall that flips up into an entrance canopy. The design burrows into a planted knoll with furrows and jagged concrete sinkholes from which colourful Calder sculptures emerge. The complex compresses barnlike, cave and meadow gallery types into a compact subterranean journey that guides visitors through discovery and unmediated encounters. Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron shaped the experience to avoid a conventional museum feel, and the Calder Foundation steered the roughly $90m project toward personal resonance with the artworks.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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