A hidden entrance makes the exceptionally designed Barnes feel exclusive– and not in a good way

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  Photos by Michael Wohlberg

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By Rob Fleming

It is a rare day, indeed, when Philadelphia gets a new art museum. Major buildings like the Barnes Foundation are like central characters in an unfolding drama of time and space within the civic heart of the city. 

The Barnes is an architectural accomplishment to be sure. Its quiet dignity, serene landscapes and soaring spaces make it a true masterpiece—a hero to be sure. But like all heroes, the Barnes has its tragic flaw. Designed by Billie Tsien and Tod Williams and opened in 2012, the Barnes Foundation sits along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and therein lies the problem. 

But first, let’s look at the highlights.

It might seem odd to start with the building’s performance, but in the early 21st century, a project that does not strive to meet the highest environmental standards possible is not worthy of the term masterpiece. 

Thankfully, The Barnes is an example of authentic sustainable design. 

Meeting LEED Platinum standards, the project is one of the greenest museums in the world. The integration of solar panels and a green roof are elegantly organized. The panels harness the sun’s energy for building use and the green roof helps to reduce the strain on the city’s combined sewer system. A large rainwater cistern stores all the water needed to flush toilets, and the lighting strategies combine artificial and natural light to perfectly illuminate the art while saving energy at the same time. 

From an environmental point of view, the Barnes stands as an exemplar of how beautiful design and high-performance green buildings can peacefully coexist. Future high-profile projects built in the city have no excuse but to match or exceed the standards achieved by the project.

Now—about that fatal flaw…

Every building in the urban context has an important role to play in creating vibrant civic spaces. Sadly, the Barnes fails in this important social-cultural responsibility.  

The facade facing the Parkway is relatively opaque, offering nary a glimpse into the magical world of art and architecture that lies behind. A dense shrubbery wall blocks views to a terrace that is accessible only to those who have “made it” into the museum. Sadly, the “closed” nature of the design speaks the language of exclusion. It ignores the lessons from the Pompidou Center in Paris, or the MET in New York, where broad architectural gestures engage the broader community and encourage everyone to “come in and enjoy the art.”

Even more disappointing is the actual entrance off the parkway. Where is it? A passerby might never know that the entrance to this amazing museum is down a wonderful pathway leading away from the parkway. 

Lessons from its neighbor, the Rodin Museum, were ignored. That museum design managed to engage the parkway in both access and scale but retain the sense of quiet reflection in the entry sequence. 

But here is the thing.  It’s not too late to attack the fatal flaw of the building’s underwhelming urban response. The exclusive shrub-protected terrace can become an inclusive set of public steps on which citizens can sit and enjoy the parkway.  The invisible pathway off the parkway can be punctuated by a new portico that encourages people from all walks of life to “come in and explore.” The “cantilevered corner” can be opened to the public and become the “Rocky Statue” for art and design lovers—a photo opportunity to be sure. 

The Barnes can go beyond its leadership in environmental performance and its standing as a design masterpiece to become a true hero—a prominent player in the city’s long tradition of civically engaged architecture.

How one advocate is pushing for accessibility in the city’s museums

Photo: Kriston Jae Bethel

By Alexandra Jones

On two legs, museums make sense. You’re able to see and be seen over the ticket counter or visitor information desk. Informational panels next to objects are relatively close to eye level. It’s easy to spot signage pointing you upstairs to another collection—and easy to get up those stairs once you do.

For a wheelchair user, it’s a different story. 

“The world was never made for people who are sitting down full time,” experiential designer Ben Baker says. “The world was made for people who walk. Everywhere you go, there’s going to be challenges.” 

At museums, those challenges are varied—whether it’s finding information about accessible parking or avoiding the glare from a glass frame that only a seated patron would see. 

That’s why when the Franklin Institute was updating its wayfinding with greater accessibility in mind, Baker, producer and resource manager at Fishtown-based experience design agency Bluecadet, advised them not only to think about how a wheelchair user moves through their museum, but to try it in a wheelchair themselves. 

“Unless you put yourself in a wheelchair and go there, you won’t have that perspective,” he says. 

According to a 2014 report issued by Institute for Museum and Library Services, there are more active museums in the United States—35,000—than locations of McDonald’s and Starbucks combined. That’s more than double the number of museums estimated in the 1990s, according to the Washington Post. 

“When you’re talking about that many places, they have to be accessible,” Baker says. “We have to be on the front lines.”

Today—often after consulting Baker—the city’s museums continue to invest in accessibility for all visitors: With his help, the Mütter Museum chose an accessible ticketing desk model when it replaced the old one a few years ago. In addition to creating more navigable spaces and richer experiences for visitors with disabilities, the Franklin Institute was the first museum in the city to adopt the new handicapped symbol, which updates the familiar icon of a person in a wheelchair to communicate agency and movement. 

The institute is also leading the way with accessibility in their interactive exhibits. Baker sees that progress reflected in the museum’s SportsZone, where visitors can crank pedals in a virtual bike race, develop and analyze their pitching technique, and even compete alongside virtual world-class athletes who appear on a huge video wall next to a 40-foot raceway. 

Among the virtual athletes visitors can compete against are Philadelphia Eagles’ wide receiver Jordan Matthews and the considerably slower Phillie Phanatic—in addition to U.S. Paralympians Tatyana McFadden, a 17-time medalist who races in a wheelchair, and world record holder Richard Browne, who sprints with a running blade.

“It’s like you’re racing next to them,” Baker says. “If it were only able-bodied athletes that I was sprinting against, I wouldn’t have a connection to it.

“To be able to race against a world-class sprinter in a wheelchair gives the able-bodied public a nice glimpse into what an athlete is capable of.”

Ever since a fall down a flight of stairs in 2005, in which he sustained injuries to his neck and spinal cord, Baker has used a manual wheelchair to get around—a change that’s impacted not only his personal life, but his life’s work. 

While his role at Bluecadet isn’t specifically about accessible design, he’s able to serve as a resource for other designers at the firm so that they can ensure their work will be accessible to all users. 

“When we’re thinking about designing size and placement of a touch wall, for example, I get to look at the specs and help figure out if it really makes sense for a wheelchair user,” Baker says. 

After graduating from Drexel University with a bachelor’s in marketing, Baker ran his own design business but soon realized he wanted to work in the cultural sector. After researching museum studies programs, he decided on Drexel’s museum leadership master’s program. 

There Baker embarked on a research project that combined his knowledge and personal experience with accessibility issues and his passion for museum studies. While a student, he authored a paper titled “Physical Accessibility in Philadelphia Museums: Looking Beyond the ADA.” It examined the restrooms, entryways, and ticketing desks at 18 different landmarks like the Philadelphia Zoo, Eastern State Penitentiary and the Philadelphia Museum of Art—but it also analyzed how well these institutions were exhibiting collections and interactive experiences, considering factors like graspability of tactile components for visitors with limited to no hand function and the height at which artworks and their accompanying informational panels were displayed.

The historical buildings that are some of the city’s most popular landmarks are, unfortunately, cultural artifacts and, as such, aren’t universally accessible. But overall, Baker found that Philadelphia museums built after World War II have been “making good strides” in accessibility, typically meeting ADA standards. 

Baker estimates that at the time of his injury in 2005, he could navigate approximately 25 percent of the city. Now he puts that that number closer to 40 percent—but an old city like Philadelphia is going to be slower to change, and that change costs more. 

One challenge is that the Americans With Disabilities Act, enacted in 1990 to ensure that people with disabilities have the same rights and access as everyone else in places open to the general public, isn’t updated very often; it was last revised in 2010. That means that even a compliant business or institution might lag behind technological advances.

Baker is working with his colleagues at Bluecadet to develop standards that go beyond ADA requirements, collaborating with a spatial designer and going through the current ADA to consider aspects of a space like steps, tabletops or interaction with a wall.

“We’re trying to think about those standards in today’s world,” Baker said. “We want to make things 100 percent accessible so that outliers are within the bell curve as opposed to being outside of it.” 

As the Baby Boomer generation ages, the number of people with disabilities visiting these institutions (and moving through public spaces in general) is growing, and Baker sees museums as being on the front lines of creating accessible spaces for all. 

“My passion is within museums, and if I can push the ball a little bit within the museum world, I think I’m making a difference for a lot of people.” 

Landscape architect Claudia West says we need functional plant communities, not over-mulched arborvitae

Illustration by Corey Brickley

interview by Heather Shayne Blakeslee

According to landscape planners Claudia West and Thomas Rainer, we should all be saying “goodbye to the real estate industry, good taste, designers’ egos, eco-evangelism and the horticulture industry.” Their book, “Planting in a Post-Wild World,” is a joyous ode to the future of landscape and garden design. Grid spoke with Claudia West.

You mention in the book that you were in East Germany in the ’80s. You say it was a “gray and polluted world, and the rivers of my childhood had a different color every week, depending on the color of dye used in the textile factories.”
CW: [As the] East German regime was crumbling in the late ’80s and then finally in ’89, ’90 with the fall of the wall, the entire economy and society changed, and the huge cleanup effort started in that East German landscape, which resulted in massive tree planting—huge reclamation projects. I think the only thing that was able to heal this landscape was brought back—and that’s plants. That changed my entire worldview really dramatically. There’s nothing more hopeful than seeing the craters of soft coal mining that eradicated an entire landscape turn into clean and clear lakes… and hearing the European wolf there at night. For me, this is the most powerful and positive message. It’s never too late. Nature is incredibly resilient.

When the colonists came to North America, what kind of a landscape would they have seen?
CW: I’m not an expert on that, but I think the first settlers here completely misunderstood this landscape. They saw it as wilderness, they saw it as threatening, because they didn’t understand it. They didn’t know that before they set foot on that land, there were people here who were managing this landscape in a very sophisticated way. [The native peoples] founded huge gardens, they managed our woodlands and forests for nuts, they managed grasslands for better hunting grounds. [They had] a very intimate relationship to the land and created incredible, biodiverse, functioning, sustainable landscapes. The land loves people back. We are just learning how to understand that and how to redesign and develop our own relationship with that land now. It’s a really fascinating process.

On the issue of wildness, what do you mean when you talk about the “legibility” of a landscape?
CW: “Legibility” is of course a term that comes from the world of landscape architecture, and it basically means that a landscape is easy to navigate. It’s easy to understand, it is designed, it resonates with people, it has emotional content—either dramatic color or some kind of feature that inherently feels comfortable to us people based on this evolutionary connection with land, these archetypal landscapes that we gravitate toward. So, “legibility” means that it’s not overpowering, not a wildness, but the eye travels clear through it, and people associate with it and feel comfortable with the landscape. In the forest, it could mean walking through the woods and there are brambles everywhere and thicket, and you almost feel intimidated by it and claustrophobic, you can’t see far—that is not legible, that’s the opposite. But what if you have your canopy trees, they’re spaced farther apart, and maybe instead of this big thick shrub layer you only have a few shrubs in there, maybe in clusters, but the rest is fairly open, and you can see, it feels comfortable, you have this beautiful, lush mix of herbaceous species covering the forest floor—that’s legibility, that’s what feels good to people.

Can you talk a little about “archetypal landscapes” that we are programmed to be drawn to by evolution?
CW: When you look to this science called ecopsychology that analyzes our human connection with landscapes, you will find out that there are certain archetypal or ideal landscapes that resonate extremely deeply within us—and that goes across cultures. These archetypal landscapes that feel inherently comfortable to us… used to support us in the past—meaning, providing secure shelter and secure and consistent sources of food: pure forests, woodlands, savannah-type landscapes and grassland-type landscapes. This is an incredible opportunity for us to reconnect with nature by using these archetypal landscapes as design inspiration.

You write that we should be envisioning “meadows growing on skyscrapers, elevated roads covered with connected forests, and vast constructed wetlands that purify our drinking water.”
CW: I think that our cities are the next new frontier. They are the places where we have a nature deficit—where many people live—and people need nature. Greenness: the most powerful color on earth. It’s not the flowers, it’s the color green that people connect to, and we need this green around us every day for our own psychological and physical health. We desperately need more natural landscapes that keep us healthy and at the same time soak up the rain and provide habitat in cities. Quite honestly, we’ve paved over the planet, and we need to bring nature back into our cities, because that’s probably where a huge chunk of nature will live in the future. All of these “wild” places outside of cities? They’re gone.

One of the pictures in the book shows a green roof on top of an Exxon gas station in the middle of a city. You could write a book just on the ironies and possibilities of that one image. Why did you include it?
CW: Maybe it’s because it shows that the opportunities are everywhere now. Like we said, it’s the meadows on top of skyscrapers or the one rain garden surrounded by an acre of paved garage or the parking lot of a big mall. We need to think outside the box and use the spaces we have available to bring as much green and functioning nature back into our cities, right on top of buildings, wherever we have an opportunity. And it is possible. This is the future of what cities will have to look like if we, as a species, want to survive.

One of the sentences that stood out to me was, “The question is not what grew there in the past but what will grow there in the future.”
CW: There’s really no going back. Even what grew there in the past, considering the new environmental conditions that we have created here on the planet, what grew in the past may not be the best solution anymore. I think that the level of environmental disturbance—pollution, climate change—and how people now use this land requires different planting scenarios so they can coexist with us in the future.

Let’s talk about home gardening. Mulch is ubiquitous, but it’s not really necessary.
CW: Right. Plants are really the best mulch on earth. Don’t get me wrong, we’re not against using mulch at all, but mulch should only be temporary in your garden, to fill gaps between plants until they are more established… [to] suppress maybe an early wave of sun-loving weed species. But then   we really want plants to grow in as they can and cover that soil on their own. So really the best and most sustainable way of gardening is letting plants be the mulch that they’re designed to be. This is how nature works, this is how plants want to grow—that’s how they evolved to grow—and it definitely works way better.

At one point you mention that “a gardener should act less like a prison guard and more like a referee.” I love that.
CW: Yes, exactly—asking people to relax and enjoy this process of gardening, instead of putting plants in solitary confinement and saying, “This is the spot that you will grow forever from now on.” Most of the really showy species people buy in garden centers don’t get any older than four or five years… by nature they’re not designed to get any older. So if they can’t reseed in your garden, you will lose them, and you will always have to replant more and more, and that is not sustainable, because every plant that comes from a nursery has an enormous carbon footprint—potted in peat moss from Siberia or Northern Canada, and then shipped from Las Vegas. The more sustainable way of gardening is letting what you have in your garden reseed and then being that referee that kind of massages where the seedlings come up and designs with that, editing to still make it look beautiful. Allowing that wildness to happen in the garden is an incredibly enjoyable way of reconnecting with nature, doing what people have done for thousands of years.

What other advice would you give to home gardeners?
CW: It’s very simple, I usually say: Plant more of the right kinds of plants. Replace the mulch with more ecological plants—meaning native and beneficial exotic species—that will dramatically help in creating better cities.
Plant more plants!

Claudia West is a consultant for North Creek Nurseries and is co-author of the book “Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes.”