Philadelphia Story

摘要

MOST of the great museums built around the turn of the 20th century have been added to, some numerous times. The 640,000-square-foot 1928 Philadelphia Museum of Art is an exception. Although many of its interior spaces had been altered, the honey-toned Kasota-limestone exterior remains almost unchanged from when it was completed by Horace Trumbauer and his senior designer, the African-American architect Julian Abele, in collaboration with Zantzinger, Borie, and Medary. Presiding over the city from its highest point, a Greco-Roman temple, enlivened by polychrome terra-cotta, forms the heart of the museum, from which extend two gallery wings that enclose a terrace atop a monumental stair facing downtown. As Philadelphia's most prominent building, adding to it is deemed inconceivable. Nearly 20 years ago, Anne d'Harnoncourt, the museum's then-director and CEO, proposed to Frank Gehry that he replicate the galvanizing effect of his Guggenheim Bilbao by digging beneath the museum. The idea did not strike the architect as peculiar. "I said, give me the problem," recalls Gehry, now 92. "I'm ready." It has been a long road from Gehry's hiring in 2006 to bring a key element of the museum's facility master plan to fruition. On May 7, the museum opened the $233 million Core Project, in which Gehry swapped his trademark sculptural bravura for a series of surgical renovations, most within the "temple" that unites the wings. "We had to restore the axial logic that had been lost over time," says current museum director and CEO Timothy Rub.