Memorial Hall
In 1876 Philadelphia hosted the hugely successful Centennial Exposition in the new Fairmount Park. Almost ten million paid admissions were recorded at the gate, at a time when the population of the United States was 46 million. Memorial Hall, the art gallery for the fair, is the only major building that survives.
Although the exposition commissioners conducted a two-round competition in 1873 for the design of the larger structures, it was determined that none of the four prize-winning designs could be built with the available funds, which were constrained by the depression of the 1870s.
Henry Pettit and Joseph Wilson, Philadelphia engineers, were then commissioned to build the gigantic but temporary Main Building and Machinery Hall, and the design of most of the other buildings was awarded to Hermann J. Schwarzmann (1846–1891). The young, Munich-trained architect had been working since 1869 for the Fairmount Park Commission, laying out the park’s walks and roadways and overseeing planting, and, in anticipation of the fair, he had been promoted to Chief Engineer and assigned the huge task of preparing for the event. In 1873 he traveled to Vienna to study the arrangements for that year’s fair.
When the competition failed to produce usable results, Schwarzmann quietly drafted his own proposal, and this was accepted. In the end, he would design 34 buildings, including the two permanent structures, Horticultural Hall and the Art Gallery. The former, a monumental greenhouse in a vaguely Moorish style, was badly damaged by Hurricane Hazel in 1954 and demolished. The Art Gallery, which was conceived in what Schwarzmann called a “modem Renaissance” style, would serve, as planned, as the first home of the Pennsylvania (now Philadelphia) Museum of Art and is now the Please Touch Museum.
The enormous building was very closely based on the design of a “Palais pour l'exposition des beaux-arts” that Nicolas-Félix Escalier (1843-1920) entered in the 1867 Prix de Rome competition at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Schwarzman evidently found the publication of Escalier’s confident design in the Croquis d’architecture for 1867. In a curious instance of secondary influence, Memorial Hall in turn inspired the dome of Paul Wallot’s Reichstag building in Berlin (1884-1894).
The materials are granite, glass, and iron, throughout, in keeping with the intent to make the building permanent and fireproof. The skylit principal rooms include the richly detailed central hall, covered by a square glass dome, and two enormous flanking galleries, each 98 feet long and 84 feet wide. The dome is crowned by a statue of Columbia by Daniel Chester French, with personifications of Industry, Commerce, Agriculture, and Mining at its corners. On the south façade, arcades connect the entrance block to the corner pavilions. These were originally open, and they screened small interior courtyards, but windows were installed in the arches and the courtyards roofed to provide more gallery space for the museum.
The new Pennsylvania Museum of Art opened in this building on the first anniversary of the Centennial, May 10, 1877. While the museum built a new home on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, which opened in 1928, Memorial Hall continued to house some collections until 1954. It was then returned to the Fairmount Park Commission, which converted it into a recreation center, with an indoor swimming pool in the east gallery and a basketball court in the west gallery.
In 2008 the Please Touch Museum opened in Memorial Hall, which had been restored and adapted for the museum by the architects Kise Straw and Kolodner.
Address: West Fairmount Park 4231 Avenue of the Republic Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19131