{"id":1341,"date":"2011-11-03T12:13:49","date_gmt":"2011-11-03T16:13:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=1341"},"modified":"2013-11-11T11:32:36","modified_gmt":"2013-11-11T16:32:36","slug":"cracking-the-sculptural-code-in-city-hall-courtyard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2011\/11\/cracking-the-sculptural-code-in-city-hall-courtyard\/","title":{"rendered":"Cracking the Sculptural Code in City Hall Courtyard"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\"Purchase <\/a> \"View <\/a>City Hall Courtyard During Subway Construction, November 16, 1915, N. M. Rolston, Photographer.<\/span><\/div>\n

Smack dab in the center of Philadelphia is a building with scads of sculpture and one persistent mystery. Philadelphia City Hall is encrusted with no less than 250 marble figures, heads, allegories, principles and attributes by Alexander Milne Calder and his team<\/a>. It\u2019s been called \u201cthe most ambitious sculptural decoration of any public building in the United States.\u201d Yet, historians<\/a> have always been a bit perplexed. City Hall is without \u201ca coherent plan for the iconography.\u201d All that marble and no meaning. How frustrating.<\/em><\/p>\n

We’ve long suspected there are hidden clues. The building\u2019s exterior and tower offer a cacophony of sculptural meaning. But when it comes to City Hall\u2019s courtyard there are no<\/em> figures, nothing<\/em> to interpret. All we see there are the nearly plain white marble surfaces. In the courtyard, the world\u2019s largest and most complex sculptural program comes to a dead stop.<\/p>\n

How could this be? Why did these prolific Philadelphians, architect John McArthur, sculptor Calder and building commissioner Samuel Perkins opt for utter silence in City Hall courtyard? Maybe we\u2019ve been asking the wrong questions, placing emphasis on the wrong sculptural syllable. Maybe it\u2019s more about what isn\u2019t<\/em> there at City Hall than what is <\/em>there.<\/p>\n

McArthur, Calder and Perkins didn\u2019t run out of ideas when they came to City Hall\u2019s courtyard. Instead, what they embraced in this heart of the building (the heart of the city!) is the opportunity to express a startlingly modern idea. It’s a sculptural program turned inside out.<\/p>\n

We the people<\/em> complete the sculptural program of City Hall. That\u2019s right. City Hall courtyard is an interactive, do-it-yourself civic sculpture, maybe the only of its kind. By being there<\/em>, we literally bring City Hall to life. The sculptural program isn\u2019t about sculpture, or historicism, or representations of any kind; it\u2019s about the living, breathing here and now. City Hall comes alive in the same way a Quaker Meeting does; it’s powered by people.<\/p>\n

Still not convinced? Stand in the center of the courtyard and look up. There, 510 feet above the sidewalk, more than 300 years in the past, stands the founder himself. We can\u2019t see him beyond the beak of a giant eagle, but we know <\/em>he\u2019s there; we feel <\/em>his presence. Look down, there\u2019s the very center of the city he dreamed up. But it\u2019s not Penn\u2019s city anymore, it\u2019s ours<\/em>. The building is a timeline starting in the 1680s and ending, literally for the moment, anyway, with us in City Hall courtyard.<\/p>\n

Standing in the center and searching for more confirmation, we look through the four portals and see the city come together at the spot where we stand, the center of the compass. Then we walk north, beneath the tower. There\u2019s bound <\/em>to be a hint of meaning there. And so there is: in the chamber criticized in 1876 as a \u201cchamber of horrors\u201d we see the carved heads of dominant animals from the four corners of the earth: bull<\/a>, bear, tiger and elephant. They focus inward toward four robust, perfectly polished red granite columns. Atop of them are human figures<\/a>, also from around the world. They <\/em>are our symbolic stand ins, arms locked and straining, bearing the burden of the tower, the history that is so high above and so long ago.<\/p>\n

But these figures are only<\/em> symbolic. Standing there, witnessing and understanding, we participate <\/em>in the meaning of the place, we join the continuum of Philadelphia<\/em>. It\u2019s all, as Walt Whitman once famously put it: \u201ca majestic and lovely show\u2014silent, weird, beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

City Hall Courtyard During Subway Construction, November 16, 1915, N. M. Rolston, Photographer. Smack dab in the center of Philadelphia is a building with scads of sculpture and one persistent mystery. Philadelphia City Hall is encrusted with no less than 250 marble figures, heads, allegories, principles and attributes by Alexander Milne Calder and his team. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1341\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}