A Stitch in Time
by
Inga Saffron
It isnt that the sprawling shipyard doesnt have its charms. The 132-year-old base at the southern tip of Philadelphia resembles a cross between an idyllic small town and the depopulated set of The Prisoner. The tree-lined, traffic-free streets of Georgian-revival officers mansions give way to redbrick industrial workshops, where for decades muscled workers bent and riveted steel into battleships. But after the place was emptied out in the late 1990s as part of a national base-closing initiative, Robert A. M. Stern Architects was hired by a city development company to come up with a master plan and marketing concept for the yards historic industrial core and the surrounding 1,200 acres of undeveloped land. The gauzy watercolor renderings from the 2004 plan offer a birds-eye view of an orderly suburban office park, some vaguely Soviet housing blocks, and a variation on Baltimores Inner Harbor. That couldnt possibly be the right home for a fashion retailer whose very name suggests downtown bohemianism, could it?
But now that the company s three brands Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, and Free People have each taken up residence in their individual workshops, I can understand why founder Richard A. Hayne was ready to pioneer the Navy Yard s uncharted territory. The company s campus in the old core isnt merely a collection of isolated loft buildings that happen to have great industrial-age bones; it s part of a ready-made city with a civilized street grid and a deeply grooved texture. It s a real place, Hayne explains. Its not Williamsburg, Virginia, pretending to be a real place, or a suburban version of what the past is supposed to look like.
Urban Outfitters' new corporate campus.
Working with Minneapolis architect Jeffrey Scherer, a founder of MS&R, UO has repurposed the Navy's war-making factories into a creative commune that is the opposite of the cookie-cutter corporate headquarters envisioned in Stern's master plan. "Stern tried to sanitize the Navy Yard," Scherer argued during an early site visit, as we made our way through Building 543, a gloomy hangar-size machine shop from 1939 that would become the company's commissary and community hub. "The master plan is afraid to admit that idiosyncratic is beautiful."??
By the 1950s, Mathsson had broadened his scope of work and began designing modernist homes that featured large spans of glass and translucent materials, which aimed to create a connection between interior rooms and the outside world. The most impressive structure is Frosakull, Mathsson’s own summerhouse completed in 1960, part of which has been recreated for the exhibition. Furnished with Mathsson’s chairs, visitors are invited to take a seat and try the pieces out for themselves. Do they deliver on the promise of an ultimate seating position? Not really. But few would argue that they’re not extremely comfortable.
