TO CHANGE THE PARK WE MUST CHA Since its inception, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway has been meant to be transformative. Embedded in its DNA is the lofty goal of transcend-
IDEAS FOR FOR THE THE BENJAMIN BENJAMIN FRANKLIN FRANKLIN PARKWAY PARKWAY IDEAS
ing the commonplace. Even if you know nothing about the City Beautiful movement and its emphasis on monumental grandeur, you can’t avoid sensing that the Parkway was designed to make you feel something important, not just be part of your daily routine. You feel this in the Parkway’s scale, every time you get an unobstructed view of City Hall or the Art Museum, and with each Trumbauer column you pass. But the Parkway has never quite attained this goal of civic transformation, which was so clearly a part its design. It serves as a public space for parades, protests, and concerts, but feels more like a container for these events than a catalyst. And the Parkway’s grand physical reality has been compromised by the grit and prosaic infrastructure of the surrounding city, which it neither successfully barred nor thoughtfully integrated. The Parkway as it stands — with a gash of highway cutting through it, parking on Eakins Oval, homeless encampments, inaccessible fountains, whirring traffic, vacant stretches, seemingly unapproachable museums — is like much of America at the moment: beautiful but broken, ambitious but imperfect, and in
20 SPRING 2022 | context | AIA Philadelphia
DESIGN WORKSHOP
need of a jolting transformation.
