As Flying Kite has reported, City Hall's Dilworth Park opened on September 4. Folks from around the city came out to get aquainted with Philadelphia's latest revamped public space.
Among those visitors was esteemed
Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron, and
she was, well, slightly disappointed.
Dilworth's new comforts, which won't be complete until November, are undermined by an uptight and controlling sensibility...The new design was intended to be the polar opposite of the 37-year-old plaza, a hardscape extravaganza by the late Vincent Kling, the same midcentury modernist who exhausted a couple of quarries building LOVE Park, the Centre Square towers, and Municipal Services Building and its plaza. In place of Kling's tricky level changes, gratuitous barriers, shadowy hiding places and puffed-up monumentality, we now have a flat, multipurpose surface, wide-open views -- and a new kind of puffed-up monumentality. There are vast amounts of hardscape...
The aesthetic is all wrong for a city eager to remake itself for an expanding creative class...Yes, there is real magic when the fountain's jets of water shoot into action, but inactivated, the granite landscape is dry and stiff. The new Dilworth is a suit in a jeans-and-T-shirt world.
Saffron goes into details about her frustrations, which extend to the materials and a lack of greenery.
It sounds strange, but the designers' emphasis on perfection is suffocating. They bludgeon you with "high quality" materials that evoke the atmosphere of a slick corporate lobby. Five types of granite are used, ranging from speckled white to dark black, on the plaza surface.
Olin's sculpted benches, which are seductive and beautiful forms, also are granite. A wooden version, similar to Olin's design for nearby Lenfest Plaza, would have softened the official feel of the place. So would some additional shade, but all the greenery has been relegated to the periphery. The nicest spot is a small grove where the chairs have been arranged on crushed gravel rather than granite.
Maybe I spent too much time in beer gardens this summer, but I found myself longing for some of their laid-back, serendipitous vibe.
All that said, Dilworth Park remains a vast improvement over its gray, dreary, lurker-shielding predecessor. There's a cafe and interactive water feature; there is also ample space for public events, be it protests or concerts. And, it's a huge project completed thanks to a public-private partnership.
There is no doubt that this important civic space, once a smelly, run-down municipal embarrassment in the heart of Philadelphia, has been greatly improved by the Center City District's Paul Levy, who marshaled a dream team of Philadelphia's most renowned designers and engineers. The amenities, from the food vendor to the picnic lawn, are reason enough to applaud.
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