New art museum slated for Parkway

The Rodin Museum will soon have a neighbor. Three generations of the Calder family of sculptors -- who successively created the statue of William Penn atop City Hall, the fountains of Logan Square and the red Eagle sculpture atop the Art Museum steps -- will be immortalized along the Parkway that binds their works together. Alexander Rower, the grandson of Alexander "Sandy" Calder, announced Wednesday at City Hall that the Calder Foundation will build a Calder Museum at 22nd Street and Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The museum plans to open before 2005. In 1998, on the 100th anniversary of Calder's birth, the Calder Foundation -- directed by Rower -- made the decision to build a museum dedicated to Calder in a major European or American city. The Philadelphia location was chosen over sites in such cities as New York and Paris, Rower said. "Philadelphia just makes a lot of sense, given all the history," Rower said. "It was inevitable. Although the entire Philadelphia-born Calder family -- all with the first name Alexander -- will be represented in the new museum, the majority of the exhibits will be of Sandy Calder's work, as he is commonly judged to be the most important of the Calder sculptors. Calder invented the mobile in 1934, and later invented stabiles -- monumental, stationary works such as the Eagle, constructed of cut and painted metal. "Calder's work comes in so many sizes and shapes, from mobiles 17 feet in circumference to some two feet, from sculptures the size of a person to sculptures two inches high," said Diano Dalto, project director with Calder Museum Partners, the non-profit organization charged with creating the museum. The pieces that will fill the museum are currently on loan by the Calder Foundation throughout the world. "There are many, many works... more than can possibly fit in the museum being designed," Rower said of the proposed 35,000 square foot facility. Dalto sees that as a positive. "The collection is large enough that pieces can rotate and change with time, so it will stay an interesting and new experience," she said. The architect chosen to draw up plans for the museum is Tadao Ando, an internationally-renowned Pritzker-Prize-winning winning architect based in Osaka, Japan. "His aesthetic is quite like Calder's in his belief in industrial materials and simplicity," Rower said. "His use of space and light and his idea of a building being alive -- it's the perfect place to put mobiles and other Calder works." Although the design is still conceptual, it is expected to be largely underground, with a sculpture garden gracing the Parkway. "The typical problem of a museum is that they need large, blank walls, which are often not very animated places to walk by," said Gary Hack, chair of the city planning commission and dean of Penn's Graduate School of Fine Arts. "This puts the blank spaces underground." The project will build upon the idea of the Parkway as a cultural center -- exactly what was intended when the Parkway was modeled after the Champs-Elysees in the early 20th century. "I think that it's not so much something aimed at Philadelphia residents," Hack said. "It's aimed at the world." Although the city contributed the land for the museum, the $35 million needed to start construction will be raised privately. The Philadelphia Museum of Art will play a major role in the administration of the new museum. "For us it's wonderful because we aspire to produce work of the same impact and consequence," Hack said, addressing the potential benefit to the GSFA. "It's more to add to the Philly resources -- it's totally beneficial to any fine arts student," fine arts graduate student Jamie Treadwell said.