Project Description
Atkin Olshin Schade Architects • The Philadelphia Museum of Art sits in Fairmount Park, one of the city’s most highly trafficked green spaces, but it has long been plagued by an all-too-urban problem: parking. Originally conceived as part of Jacques Gréber’s 1917 plan for the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the site had been encroached upon by unsightly surface parking and was partially overgrown. The team devised a plan to create a 442-spot underground parking lot, topped by a green roof. “The parking is really heroic,” juror Bill Valentine said. “To do that, to get it underground so that [Philadelphia-based fellow juror] John Cary doesn’t even notice it when he jogs by there, [is a feat].” The jurors were more taken with the parking below grade, but above ground, the green roof performs some heroics of its own: It has enough underlying structure to withstand the weight of monumental sculpture, giving the museum an outdoor exhibition space it had long been lacking.