Philadelphia Museum of Art

Where it sits. The museum occupies the summit of Fairmount at 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, a rocky rise above the Schuylkill that held the city's reservoir until the building displaced it. Three pavilions of golden Minnesota dolomite are arranged around a central court in the manner of a Greek sanctuary, closing the northwestern end of the Parkway the way City Hall closes the southeastern end. It opened in 1928 after a long construction, and the design came from Horace Trumbauer's office together with Zantzinger, Borie and Medary. The chief designer in Trumbauer's practice was Julian Abele, the first African American graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's architecture school, whose hand also shaped Widener Library at Harvard — a quiet transcontinental link between two of the most photographed staircases in the country.

Look up before you go in. The building's most unusual feature is easy to walk past. The pediment of the north pavilion carries a polychrome terracotta group completed in 1933 by the sculptor C. Paul Jennewein, thirteen figures from Greek myth in glazed blues, reds and golds. Ancient Greek temples were painted, and this is one of the very few American attempts to admit it in public. The roof tiles are blue, the gutters end in bronze griffins that the museum adopted as its emblem, and the whole mass reads as pale gold at midday and deep amber an hour before sunset. The east steps below it are the ones the Rocky films made famous; the Schomberg bronze stands at their foot on the north side.

The collection. Roughly a quarter of a million objects span two thousand years, and the museum's strengths are specific rather than encyclopaedic. It holds the largest collection of work by Marcel Duchamp anywhere, including Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, the cracked glass panels of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, and Étant donnés, a tableau installed after his death that can only be seen by putting both eyes to two holes bored through a Spanish barn door. Cy Twombly's ten-canvas Fifty Days at Iliam has its own room. There is a Van Gogh Sunflowers, Cézanne's Large Bathers, Rubens, Poussin, a formidable American holding built around Thomas Eakins, and a suite of period architecture brought here whole: a Japanese teahouse, a Chinese palace hall, and the pillared stone hall of a South Indian temple.

The rebuilt core. Between 2017 and 2021 Frank Gehry's practice completed a renovation that added no exterior mass at all. The work, finished in May 2021, excavated and reopened spaces the 1928 building had walled off, including a vaulted walkway on the ground floor that had been sealed for decades, and returned around 8,000 square metres to public use. The result is unusual for a Gehry commission: restrained, mostly invisible from outside, and aimed at circulation rather than spectacle. The museum's second building, the Perelman, sits across Pennsylvania Avenue in a 1927 Art Deco former insurance headquarters and holds costume, textiles, photography and design, and is far quieter than the main house.

What a visit actually involves. The galleries are large and the layout rewards choosing two or three destinations rather than attempting the whole. The first floor holds modern and contemporary work plus the Duchamp rooms; the second holds European painting and the transplanted architectural interiors; the great stair hall between them is dominated by Augustus Saint-Gaudens's gilded Diana, which once stood on top of the second Madison Square Garden in New York. Admission covers the Perelman Building on the same day and the day after. There is a ramped and lift-served entrance on the west side facing Kelly Drive, which is the practical way in for anyone who does not want the east steps.

Getting there and timing. It is a twenty-minute walk from City Hall straight up the Parkway, past Swann Memorial Fountain and the Barnes Foundation, or a short ride on SEPTA buses along the same route. Friday evenings bring extended hours and a pay-what-you-wish policy that fills the halls with a younger local crowd; weekday mornings are the calmest. Late afternoon is the hour for the exterior, when the dolomite warms and the view back down the Parkway is at its clearest. Behind the building, a stair drops to the Fairmount Water Works — a Greek Revival pumping station of 1815 that supplied the city from the river below — and onto the Schuylkill River Trail, which runs north past Boathouse Row. Together they make the museum less a single stop than the anchor of a half-day on the hill.