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Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
It's like that old black hole no matter how you try, you set out each day never to arrive
From the train station in lovely and cosmopolitan Denville, New Jersey, a 4:07 PM train takes you to New York Penn Station by 5:30 PM, if it’s on time and not delayed (which, if you know New Jersey Transit, is a really, really big if), There, underground and in one of the worst buildings in the country, you’ll have about an hour to kill before boarding an Amtrak Keystone train bound for Philadelphia and Harrisburg. In the same amount of time that it takes to travel the 40 miles on New Jersey Transit, you will have traveled 80 miles or more on Amtrak, and by 8 PM you’ll be standing on a bridge on the Schuylkill River, looking back at 30th Street Station and getting ready to walk to the wonderful Loews Philadelphia Hotel and the 2016 AIA Convention.
If you have ever read any of the AIA Convention slideshows (this is the tenth one now), chances are you have realized that I’m all about the tours since I generally write that over and over again at the start of each slideshow. Unlike some previous AIA convention cities (sorry, Atlanta), Philadelphia has great potential and am interesting, rich architectural history, so luckily the tours were really strong this time.
The first tour pictured (and the first tour that I went on) took us to Boathouse Row, a collection of buildings that anyone who has ever taken an Amtrak train between New York and Washington, DC has seen- they are opposite the Schuylkill River just north of Philadelphia 30th Street Station, and at night they are edge lit with christmas lights all year long. On this tour we learned all about the buildings and their clubs, and also got to see inside two of the boathouses: The University Barge Club and Frank Furness’ Undine Barge Club.
You don’t need to book an AIA Convention tour to go and see the Barnes Collection, housed in a beautiful building designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien right on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Even if you don’t buy a ticket, you can still stop by and hang out in the calming atrium for a while and admire the details for as long as you want.
If you do buy a ticket to see the collection you won’t be sorry, but you will be confused. The beautiful building and its calming atrium lead you into a door and a completely separate experience inside. The original collection was willed to be open to the public by Albert Barnes, but with the condition that the artwork remains hung as is. The museum’s trustees found a workaround though when they decided to relocate the museum from Merion (on the Main Line just west of the city) to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. They recreated the existing buildings interiors and then wrapped it all in the shell building. The experience is jarring, from the calming atrium you pass through a portal and suddenly you’re in a completely different building with really nice art hung chaotically all over the place. Luckily when you leave all of that chaos, you get to pass through the calming atrium again before heading back into the city.
Walking inside the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from Broad Street is like entering a world where it's suddenly ok to do anything you want architecturally. Every turn brings a view where everything is somehow more overdone than the last, yet somehow it all works. And I think there is even art there as well, although it's pretty hard to see between all of the very, very decorated decoration.
More pictures of the very, very decorated decoration, which does its best to overwhelm you at every possible opportunity.
The AIA Convention is more than awesome building tours, god awful seminars, underground bare knuckle fights to the death and frequent Rem Koolhaas sightings. There are lots of chances to uncomfortably hang out with other architects and design professionals in a variety of settings. One such occasion in Philadelphia provided a great reason to take a shuttle bus all the way to the Philadelphia Navy Yard to enjoy free food and drinks in front of this building- Bjarke Ingels' almost finished office building at 1200 Intrepid, where from certain angles the facade appeared to follow curves and angles that felt somewhere between unnecessary and impossible.
When that sick bastard Charles Dickens came to the United States, he only wanted to see three things. The first was Five Points, the notorious slum in Lower Manhattan where Leonardo DiCaprio murdered Daniel Day Lewis. The second was Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia where in a just society, Leonardo DiCaprio would have been sent for murdering Daniel Day Lewis instead of limping off screen through Brooklyn with Cameron Diaz and that insulting Irish accent of hers. The third was Niagara Falls, where no one knows what depravity Dickens dark, dark mind expected to see, although chances are it was pretty damn awful based on his other tourism choices.
If there is anywhere in this world that is haunted, it is this place. Life in Eastern State would have been almost unimaginably horrid as you would be left completely alone for years and years with your criminal thoughts until nothing else remained. The building stands partially in ruins, collapsing because of the cruelty of time and the weight of its own history. I remain under the belief that Eastern State needs to be seen to be understood and highly recommend a visit to see it for yourself- to walk the halls and the ruins between all of those ghosts and demons that remain trapped between its unforgiving walls.
