Eldridge Johnson, founder of the Victor Talking Machine Co., became Chairman of the Museum Board in the late 1920s. Johnson's Museum benefactions were many. He sponsored archaeological expeditions to Ur (Iraq), Beth Shean (Palestine), and Piedras Negras (Guatemala), resulting in the excavation of some of the Museum's most celebrated artifacts. He also donated stellar objects to the collections, including two limestone reliefs of the favorite horses of the Chinese Emperor T'ai Tsung, and the rock crystal sphere of the Dowager Empress Cixi. The latter item Johnson purchased in memory of Museum Director George Byron Gordon. Gordon died in 1927 as the third wing erected during his administration was rising. Few have remembered Johnson's primary role in funding the Museum's fourth section. He declined to have the building named for himself, opting instead for its designation as the Administrative Wing. As the years went by, Museum staff began calling it the Educational Wing since that department conducted activities there. When the Education Department relocated in 1971, staff began calling its former home the Sharpe Wing, after the Sharpe Memorial Gallery on the top floor corridor, named for Richard and Sally Patterson Sharpe. By extension, the entrance and adjacent courtyard began to be called Sharpe as well.
Construction photographs of the Museum's early buildings are very rare. The wing under construction here was intended to house offices for the Director and Board, the Education Department and classrooms, and collection study rooms, including a Members' Room. Only a transverse corridor gallery on each of its upper three floors would be devoted to exhibition space. Two floors below ground were for storage. From the earliest days the Museum and Franklin Field Stadium had been like siblings growing up by the banks of the Schuylkill. Now in the Roaring Twenties they were reaching adulthood together. The Stadium had been rebuilt in 1922 and further enlarged in 1925, just as the Museum expanded in 1924 and again in 1929. Together with the White Pavilion of the University Hospital (1922) and the Irvine Auditorium (1926), they transformed this section of South and Spruce Sts. into one of the most monumentally elegant corridors in the City.
By comparing these photographs one gains a sense of the architectural harmony between the Administrative Wing and Stadium. The Stadium, which had the same architects, Day & Klauder, is an austere echo of the elaborate Museum wing. Both have the striking course of grand arches surmounted by pairs of small arches, and both employed the same building materials. The Stadium forms, in effect, a visual wall enclosing the Museum's courtyard -- a masterful solution. The Administrative Wing was planned as the main entrance for the entire Museum complex, although modified from semicircular to straight. It was envisioned that the portals would lead from the driveway to the planned central rotunda with a 2,000-seat auditorium below. The exquisite architectural detailing initiated on the 1899 building was carried through here as well, and by the same artisans when possible. Most notable are the sculptural embellishments by Alexander Stirling Calder (1870-1945). Calder is best known in Philadelphia for the Swann Fountain at Logan Circle (1924), another project in which he collaborated with architect Wilson Eyre. His father is known for the William Penn statue atop City Hall, while his son is the Calder of mobile fame. The masterful blend of architecture, sculpture, and practical purpose evidenced in the Administrative Wing courtyard and Stadium is nowhere more apparent than in the life-size representations atop the gateposts of the courtyard. As indicated by Calder, the paired figures portray Asia (India and China), Europe (Ancient and Modern), Africa (Islamic North and Negro Sub-Saharan), and America (North and South Native American). [See more of Calder's courtyard sculptures: the four continents, Museum arms/insignia, doorway lintels, fountain.]
Extending the international theme established in the architecture and sculpture of the original 1899 courtyard, Calder's continental personifications are eloquent. Urns to each side bear ethnographic face masks appropriate to the continent represented in the adjacent figure. Most surprising is the statuary for Europe. In Calder's incisive feminist statement, an unveiled ancient Greek maiden in long garment and sun hat touches hands across the centuries with a modern European woman in shortened skirt and bobbed hair: a Roaring Twenties flapper! After installation, Calder was queried by one of the architects as to whether a mistake had been made in facing the statues toward the courtyard instead of South Street. He replied that due to the Museum's withdrawn character, it was more appropriate for the world to face the Museum.
