OPEN AIR
treehouse. This is a piece of site specific sculpture by the artist Martin Puryear. Fortunately it is the kind of site sculpture that you can walk into and sit on, my favorite kind. It is beautiful, perched over a deep ravine in a hidden corner of the Horticultural Center here in Philadelphia. Some of the trails leading to it are blocked off and overgrown (it is a very underfunded public horticultural center), but there is one path, weedy and trash-strewn you can follow to get there. So it gives you a hint of a holy grail: you may follow a few dead ends before you finally find the right path. And then you have to watch your step: it is not a smooth manicured byway. But then you come out of the tangled, confusion into this beautiful, light, clean space. You cross the wooden bridge into the treehouse poised out over the ravine, and it feels like being held very delicately in a giant's hand.