by Tom Eveslage
The next time you drive around or pass through the CityView circle, or walk into the garden area near the pool, pause a moment to thank artist Winifred Lutz. The Philadelphia sculptor used once-buried remnants of a 19th-century maternity hospital for indigent mothers to create what she called “a path from the past to the future” in 1990, when CityView II was under construction, then as part of the Buttonwood Apartment Complex.
While a professor at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, Lutz proposed a creation that met parameters of the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority. She applauds the PRA’s One Percent Program, which requires that a percentage of construction costs go to art reflecting the site and enhancing the city. “Philadelphia threw away a lot” when buildings were razed and history lost over time, she said.
An internationally-recognized sculptor, Lutz has completed more than 20 site-integrated sculpture installations throughout the United States and as far away as the Netherlands. CityView was the first site of 10 commissioned permanent sculptural gardens she created.
Lutz said that for CityView she chose to “integrate geological, botanical and cultural” elements in an installation appropriately entitled “How to Retain Site Memory While Developing the Landscape.” She started with the “site memory” uncovered when construction began on CityView II. Left were 20 marble columns, each weighing several tons, from the Preston Retreat, a maternity hospital opened in 1865. It was closed in 1960 and the building demolished in 1963.
Lutz wanted the installation to serve as “a path from the past to the future,” with a sense of seclusion. As a self-proclaimed “environmental artist,” she said she strives to find an “unbiased way to see a site’s opportunities.” Site-integrated work, she says, tries to incorporate many things that an individual doesn’t easily realize.
She had to fight a bit for her vision. She said the CityView II architect wanted what Lutz called a “monstrous” canopy of sorts, “a shelter for the columns,” and wanted Lutz to redesign her work. “That’s dreadful,” she told the developer, and he agreed with her.
She worked with the stacked columns, salvaged granite bridge blocks and curb stones, plus slate, bluestone and boulders. They were specific to the region, Lutz said, as were the plants she chose.
Beginning at the front of CityView, Lutz said, her work blends the past and the present, from the circle through what now is the corridor, to the garden area and back of CityView. In the circle, trees were trimmed to about half the length of the stacked pillars.
Lutz used columns retrieved from the Preston Retreat to help create her CityView sculptures.
When she started the work there was no foliage in what we now call the backyard. She wanted two gardens connecting the entry circle and 20th Street. Using the remaining marble columns from the four original massive entrance columns of the Preston Retreat, she created two full columns to act as poles (of past and future time) at the opposite ends of the gardens.
“The concept of the garden,” Lutz wrote in her proposal, “was to join the architectural and natural histories of the location with its current use to become an embodiment of memory,” reminding the garden’s users of both past and future. “Column sections and regional boulders punctuate the interior garden and stone paths intersect with and are inlaid in the system of paved arcs.”
In September of 2014, Lutz revisited her 25-year-old creation for CityView. She also met with the landscape architect doing work now on the renovated backyard. She said the plan is “great,” showing care for the “pathway” there. She’s pleased with the current plans and feels the present backyard “gives people a secluded sense of the natural environment.” She believes that the restoration will bring the look and feel in the backyard closer to her original vision.
“Yes, the look of the backyard and artwork has changed,” Lutz said, “but that’s OK, and to be expected. Ecology changes, and that’s OK.” Plants’ “understory” changes as trees grow and provide more shade, she added, and you have to have a different understory then. “The main thing is that you have a green environment” in the backyard, Lutz said.
Many residents see the city today and get the sense that the city was always like that, Lutz said. She believes that her work and that of other artists “improve the city’s ethos—enhancing the environment and the people, and making the city more commercially viable.