Celebrating National Historic Preservation Month
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May is National Historic Preservation Month.
To celebrate, the Preservation Alliance asked 31 historic preservation leaders in Philadelphia to name a building that has inspired them and why. We invite you to watch this space daily and hear from leaders in the local preservation movement as they reveal the historic buildings that have inspired them.
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Frank Matero
The [former] Liberty Bell Pavilion
Independence Mall, Philadelphia
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For generations of tourists, any visit to Philadelphia included the requisite pilgrimage to the icons of democracy including the Liberty Bell. But the country’s Bicentennial offered a fresh face to that history. As a first year grad student in Columbia’ University’s Historic Preservation program, our trip to Philadelphia in 1976 was memorable including Venturi Scott Brown’s Franklin Court and Mitchell/Giurgola’s Liberty Bell Pavilion. That first image of the sleek granite and glass box stayed with me far longer than the bell it housed or even the very buildings the park celebrated. Years later, now a Philadelphia resident, the demolition of the pavilion sparked my interest into how this small gem came to be and then vanished overnight.
Since its removal from public service almost 100 years after its creation, the Liberty Bell has been on public display. Perhaps not surprising for a physical symbol of such exalted ideals as liberty, freedom, and independence, the Bell has always been displayed as artifact; a secular relic whose physical presence is proof of the events it signaled and witnessed. As early as 1874 and again in 1924 and the 1960s, a separate structure was proposed to house the bell, however these were all abandoned leaving the bell in its cramped space in Independence Hall stair tower. In 1969 during planning for the Bicentennial, NPS officials believed the expected number of tourists could not be accommodated in the small space. Again they proposed that the Bell be moved to a new visitor center a few blocks away. The opposition to this plan resulted in the Mitchell/Giurgola pavilion located on Independence Mall directly in front of the Bell’s original location. Aldo Giurgola’s design for the Liberty Bell Pavilion was misunderstood by the public from the beginning. The most visible of all the new projects included in the Bicentennial make-over of Independence National Historical Park, the architects conceived and built the structure in record time in a little over one year.
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Reversing over 100 years of exalted presentation, Giurgola literally brought the bell down to earth, mounting it on a simple pair of stanchions and placing it in a low transparent pavilion in a garden with a simultaneous view to Independence Hall. Transparency allowed the icon to be visible continuously to the public, much like crystal reliquaries in the Middle Ages. Program dictated plan whereby visitors were first brought through an entry vestibule into a waiting hall and down a nave-like corridor until finally coming to the bell chamber. The pavilion’s dumbbell axiality was both functional and psychologically effective in building visitor expectations. Information on site was kept to a minimum; interpretation was largely verbal and the emotional experience of seeing and touching the Bell was dominant. As realized, the elegant structure was built of materials in concert with the pavilion’s eighteenth century context—American granite, oak, lead-coated copper, glass and plaster. The complex roof articulated the interior space while providing shelter for the lines of visitors waiting outside to enter.
Progressive Architecture
summed up the intent of the designers by describing the pavilion as “…a simple, reticent space that does not draw attention to itself, but directs it to the Liberty Bell and Independence Mall which, after all, are what one comes to see.”
In 1998, as part of a larger effort to re-envision Independence Mall, the Liberty Bell was relocated to a new home on the green which expanded interpretation into a full museum exhibition on the Bell’s history and its symbolism. Giurgola’s late modernist box was demolished in favor of a new form for a new program and display. His installation set a standard of exhibition that summed up an entire generation’s approach to display favoring experience over interpretation. His pavilion was in effect an open-ended memory container which invited visitors to bring their own interpretations to the concepts of liberty as delivered up in the presence of this great American icon.
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Frank Matero
Chair, Graduate Program in Historic Preservation, Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania and founder and Director of the Center for Architectural Conservation.
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NEW VIRTUAL LECTURES
Watch from the safety and
comfort of your own home!
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Tuesday, June 2, 6:00 PM to 7:30 PM
Saving Neon and Rowhouse Culture
Presented by Len Davidson
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Founder,
Neon Museum of Philadelphia
For over 40 years Len Davidson has produced new neon and collected the old, both in sign and story. His 1999 book "Vintage Neon" is an essential photo archive and cultural history for sign lovers. Len’s interactive talk will examine Philly neon history including his establishment of the Neon Museum of Philadelphia in lower Kensington.
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Tuesday, June 9, 6:00 PM to 7:30 PM
Philadelphia's Everyday Modernism
Presented by William Whitaker
, Curator of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia has its share of exceptional modern buildings. Louis Kahn’s Richards Laboratory and Robert Venturi’s Mother’s House are two iconic examples of the role that the city’s architects played in defining (and redefining) architecture internationally during the second half of the twentieth century. But focusing on those luminous examples and other works of the so-called “Philadelphia School” risks missing the vibrant, everyday modernism of the Philadelphia neighborhood: the corner store, the health center, and the filling station. Missing too is the modernism that shaped the burgeoning bedroom communities beyond the city line: from King of Prussia to Cherry Hill, Levittown to the Concord Pike in Wilmington, with all those highway interchanges, shopping centers, hotels and motels, and office parks in-between.
Venturing out into this world can be fascinating and sometimes it leads to the discovery of buildings that are significant nationally—but overlooked. This talk will bring that legacy into vivid focus. These less celebrated buildings were, after all, far better integrated into the lived experience of most Philadelphians than their more famous counterparts. And although the purposes that many of these examples once served have given way to “progress,” they demonstrate remarkable architectural ingenuity and provide lessons for today’s designers, who continue to add to the distinctive vitality and variety of Philadelphia’s modernism.
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TICKETS COMING SOON
Michael Lewis - A Talk on the Work of Frank Furness
Tuesday, June 16, 6:00 PM to 7:30 PM
and
Jeffrey Cohen - The part and the whole: Wilson Eyre and a quiet architectural revolution in 1880s Philadelphia
Tuesday, June 23, 6:00 PM to 7:30 PM
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