THE 500TH MEETING OF THE PHILADELPHIA HISTORICAL COMMISSION
[The following comments were made by Michael Sklaroff, Chairman of the Philadelphia Historical Commission, and were reprinted in the April 22, 2004 Metro Commentary section of the Philadelphia Inquirer.]
The 500th meeting of the Philadelphia Historical Commission, held Thursday, April 8, 2004, passed into history with hardly a mention in the press. There was no heated debate on the adaptive reuse of major buildings; no issues regarding the establishment of new districts; and little to stir the pot of design controversy.
But an otherwise unremarkable meeting was one of the most important Commission sessions in recent memory. Two major Philadelphia landmarks were presented for consideration and after full discussion inscribed in the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places.
The Guild House, 711 Spring Garden Street, is the extraordinary work of Robert Venturi (with William Short, John Rauch and Cope & Lippincott). It represents, among other things, community-based elderly housing made possible by the efforts of Philadelphia's Quaker community. The building itself is considered by many a revolutionary design.
As Commission staffer Jon Farnham wrote in his outstanding nomination, "[p]erhaps more than any other building in the world, Guild House marks the paradigmatic shift away from Modernism, the style and ideology that dominated architectural discourse between 1925 and 1975." Farnham recognized that this somewhat modest structure represented a fundamental change in American architecture from a "heroic, future-oriented" celebration of modernity and its commitment to "abstraction, technology, innovation, unity, and purity" toward a " post-modern world" of convention, complexity and contradiction. To the extent this unprepossessing building exalts (if we may use the term) the "ordinary and conventional," it is a landmark appropriate to Philadelphia's self-image
But Guild House is not uniformly admired in the design community. And that is another delightful aspect of the work. The building, which appears in the standard undergraduate architectural history textbook, is disturbing to many. It defies symmetry, at least in the margins. And this may well be part of Venturi's conception: to provoke as well as please. It is remarkable, one might say, when the conventional, ordinary and modest can provoke such fierce debate among design professionals.
If the Guild House and its contradictions challenge the brain, the Marian Anderson House at 762 Martin Street engages the heart. This modest two-story vernacular rowhouse is remarkable not for its design or its structure, but for the fact that at age 27 Marian Anderson bought this house, in a neighborhood where she had lived as a child. She lived there for almost 70 years, until her death in 1993.
This nomination celebrates the person not the architecture. A woman of valor, a celestial talent, was Marian Anderson. "The Lady from Philadelphia" (as Edward R. Murrow titled his film of Marian Anderson's tour of Asia) was an international celebrity, a true ambassador for America and a powerful, living icon of the civil rights movement. Among her firsts: in 1936 she sang at the White House; Easter Sunday 1939 she sang "America" for 75,000 at the Lincoln Memorial; and in 1955 she was the first African-American to perform with the New York Metropolitan Opera. Her awards include the United Nations Peace Prize; the Congressional Gold Medal, the Kennedy Award for a Lifetime of Achievement, the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Awards and a Grammy for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts.
Preservation at its best tells us what we need to know about who we are. We may have forgotten Marian Anderson's role in the great American struggle for equality. This nomination helps remind us. The Commission is indebted to Blanche Burton'Lyles and her colleagues for leadership in pursuing the nomination. The Guild House and Marian Anderson's home each represent important treasures of Philadelphia history.
