Frank Gehry talks about the porticoed and pedimented structure that houses the Philadelphia Museum of Art as though it were a living being, referring to its “good bones” and its “heart.” The Pritzker Prize–winning architect has been involved in renovating the 1928 Beaux Arts building at the head of Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway since 2006, when his Los Angeles-based firm was hired to develop the museum’s master plan. The long-range set of projects aims to replace antiquated building systems, create new galleries, and improve wayfinding and circulation, which Gehry says had become confusing and “muddled” after earlier modifications. The museum had “clogged up arteries,” he explains.

Full completion of all the construction outlined by the master plan is many years away, but visitors now have a sense of Gehry’s approach to remedying this situation. Earlier this week, on September 18, an historic entrance on the museum’s north side reopened, as did about half of a striking vaulted walkway, running from one side of the museum to the other. Though conceived as public spaces by Horace Trumbauer and Julian Abele, the museum’s original architects, both the entrance and the passage had been long off-limits to museumgoers, having been used as a loading dock and for storage since at least the mid 1970s.