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An glistening metallic wall carves through a scrubby mound on the edge of a highway in the city, resembling a slender steel blade plunging into the earth. Midway along its length, this silvery barrier curls up, recalling the lid of a enormous laptop, forming an entrance overhang that beckons you inside. As you climb the grassy knoll, you find deep furrows scooped into the ground, jagged concrete sinkholes from which the peaks of vibrant sculptures protrude.

Step Into Calder Gardens

Step into Calder Gardens, an otherworldly place imagined by renowned architects the creative team to honor the work of local Alexander Calder, master of kinetic art. It is one of the most distinctive cultural centers to be built in the world in the past decade. On an modest site no larger than a open lot, wedged between two roads, a mesmerizing sequence of spaces lead visitors on a journey of exploration deep into the ground. It is somewhat barn, part cave and part rolling meadow, packing a whole range of different gallery types into one concentrated encounter.

It feels very much tailored to our age of spectacle – the camp dramatic quality can verge on Disneyish

“I have never worked on anything of this nature before,” remarks renowned the architect, who has created countless museums and galleries globally, often reimagining the genre each time. “There was literally no guidelines. It felt like an artist, starting each day every morning without someone directing me what to do. Architecture is rarely this open.”

Despite lacking a defined brief, the client certainly had firm opinions about what they did not want. “I had no intention of making a conventional space,” notes Calder’s grandson, Calder’s grandson and director of the artistic estate, who steered the $90m project. “We wanted people to be able to sit in connection with the work and have their own mysterious, unmediated experience. My grandfather never intended to dictate the viewer’s reaction, so we aim to avoid to tell people what to think.”

A Patient Journey

The project has been a long time coming. Brought into the world in 1898, Calder was the next in line in a lineage of acclaimed Philadelphia artists. His grandfather crafted the statue of the city founder that crowns City Hall, while his father created a dramatic fountain of resting river gods, placed on a traffic circle nearby. But the younger Calder moved from the city at the age of eight and – except for a significant mobile in the primary art museum – has never had any real presence here, until this moment.

His grandson describes the project as something of a introspective quest. Rower has referred to the complex as a subterranean structure, meaning an underground temple or tomb, calling it “a hallowed space for reflection” – and there is a solemn air to the place. Visitors are taken on a dramatic journey of constriction and expansion, ushered through dim passages, then emerged into unexpectedly airy galleries, allowed to glance around corners, rest in cubbies, and explore sunken gardens to experience the work on their own terms, with not a wall text in sight. The idea is not to ask when and how these sculptures were made, or what they might mean, but to submit yourself to a pure aesthetic encounter, engaging with Calder’s moving creatures in this fascinating hidden collection. So is it effective?

The Entrance

The entry sequence is completely different from the nearby neoclassical cultural buildings that line Philadelphia’s cultural corridor – a inaccurate label for an inhospitable strip of highways, cut through this part of the city in the 1960s. Once you have crossed 10 lanes of traffic, you arrive at a hilly garden (regrettably ringed by an unsightly chainlink fence) and ascend one of several winding paths, through what will one day grow into a rich display of perennials, laid out by Dutch celebrity horticulturist Piet Oudolf, finally reaching a circular plaza at the summit.

Stepping beneath the building’s sharp steel overhang, you find yourself in a inviting timber-lined lobby, with the feel of a domestically sized Apple Store. A stepped staircase leads down to the first glimpse of a lowered gallery, where the contorted spidery limbs of one of Calder’s “static sculptures” arc out in taut arcs. A mobile hangs above, floating like a scatter of black paint, frozen in mid-air. The rumbling interstate highway can be fleetingly glimpsed through a long straight window, providing a glimpse of the outside world that will soon be forgotten as you go down into the Earth.

A Hypnotic Pathway

Things start to get more surreal at a second staircase, which twists down through what feels like a tunnel, lined with textured black sprayed concrete with the texture of rugged basalt. A oval rupture carved through the wall provides a window on to another Calder mobile, hanging illuminated in the gloomy gloom like a phantom white cluster of coathangers. The dim stairs lead to a illuminated central gallery, topped by a shiny plaster ceiling, which droops in a shallow dome overhead, like the underside of a puddle. It adds a dreamlike, eerie air, as if the weight of the ground above might cave through at any moment. One of Calder’s red steel animals curls in the middle in complex gymnastic curves, while more mobiles hang nearby, like assemblages of sharp-edged birds.

Viewports on either side provide vistas of further creations. In one direction, a equilibrium black-and-red object stands encased in a tubular concrete well. It is bordered by a shadowy arc-shaped corridor gallery, where paintings and drawings hang on the unfinished foundation walls. A side recess presents another mobile against a smooth white backdrop, with the depthless quality of a photographic studio. Another purple-painted niche houses a sort of family altar, with works by Calder’s parents and grandfather. On the other side of the gallery, a door leads to the “memory garden”, where a trace of the site’s historic street pattern is evoked in the form of jagged concrete forms jutting out into the courtyard, their surfaces roughened with a coarse, earthy finish, as if newly excavated from the earth. (Drainage issues put paid to the possibility of using natural materials; instead, concrete is used throughout to mimic stone and soil.)

“Calder’s work was about negative space,” explains Herzog, “so our process was one of carving and carving, rather than creating solid form. We see the project as an living entity with different parts, each with its unique character, creating unexpected situations. If not, things are too routine.”

Energetic Vision

You can feel a noticeable dynamism on show throughout the complex. At times it can feel like an excess of ideas squeezed into too small a space, a masterful display of {Herzog & de Meuron|the