Once upon a time, a museum garden was a pretty straightforward proposition: an ornamental space — often a manicured lawn or stone plaza, sprinkled with flower beds and sculpture — serving as a complement to, and respite from, the elite institution next door.
Think about beautiful but familiar spaces like the rooftop garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art or the courtyard gardens at the Frick Collection in New York City and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
But such projects have fundamentally transformed in recent years, reflecting, among other things, seismic shifts in both museums’ priorities and the profession of landscape architecture, as well as a surge in interest in outdoor space because of the pandemic. The first rule: don’t dare call them gardens. These are sophisticated landscapes integrating — and enhancing — institutions’ missions while also encouraging education, sustainability and a much-needed sense of civic welcome.
“The museum has realized it is the new kind of community space,” said Walter Hood, a landscape artist and MacArthur Foundation grant winner who has worked on numerous museum landscapes in recent years, including those of the de Young Museum in San Francisco and the Oakland Museum of California, which are designed to attract visitors who may not even enter the building at all. So too is his most recent undertaking, for the International African American Museum in Charleston, S. C., which opened last June.
International African American Museum
The 2.3-acre project is known as the African Ancestors Memorial Garden. Extending below and around the elevated museum building (designed by the architects Pei Cobb Freed & Partners and Moody Nolan), it adds layers of meaning that go well beyond what the institution — dedicated to sharing the trauma, joy and resilience of the African American experience — could ever do inside. It sits directly on Gadsden’s Wharf, where most experts estimate more than 100,000 African captives entered the United States.
Its landscaped spaces, which Hood calls “exterior exhibits,” are as eclectic as they are powerful. They include a tall grove of Canary Island palms that evoke the sprawling reach of the African diaspora; rolling dunes planted with soft Bahia grass, representing Charleston’s early shoreline; and meandering, wood-planked pathways edged with both African and native Carolina species, like waist-high sweet grass and soft rush. All are laid out episodically, evoking the many types of “Hush Harbors,” clandestine spaces where enslaved people would congregate and share stories.
Each component draws on Hood’s longtime work as both an artist and landscape designer. There is the Warehouse Walk, large granite walls coupled with cast-concrete sculptures of life-size crouching figures, which traces the footprint where the enslaved were warehoused. The Tide Tribute pool, where abstracted bodies appear in relief on the pavement, evokes chained Africans packed on ships, constantly submerged and uncovered by a shallow pool of water. Elsewhere, meandering brick walls allude in part to Thomas Jefferson’s serpentine walls at the University of Virginia, which were built by unacknowledged slaves.
Hood emphasizes the crucial role that symbolism and storytelling, be it visual or narrative, has played in the African American experience, and the preservation of that history. Each piece of the garden, he added, can be interpreted in a multitude of ways. “Museums are places where you can say something about the culture. Where we can begin to vet some of these things that we don’t want to talk about. It goes back to the idea of these being the new civic spaces, where honest conversations can be had.”
First Americans Museum
At no museum has earth so decisively shaped architecture as the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, which opened in 2021 to share the collective histories of 39 Oklahoma-based tribal nations. Approaching the curved building (slightly raised to protect from potential flooding from the adjacent Oklahoma River), one is immediately struck by its 90-foot-high, 1,000-foot-diameter, grass-covered berm, known as the FAM Mound, rising in a crescent behind the building. The landform was inspired, in part, by the region’s mysterious mounds built by Indigenous people and the significance of the circle in Native tradition, which symbolizes the sacred earth and guides the cycles of life, the seasons, the cardinal directions, the stars, gatherings and infinitely more.
Johnson Fain, the project’s design architect, along with the landscape architect Hargreaves Jones, spent dozens of hours collecting lessons from members of the tribes involved, often gathered in circular assemblies.
“You begin to understand this idea of honoring the earth and using it in creative ways,” said William Fain, a Johnson Fain partner, who added that the team chose the site in part for existing features — like woodlands, plains and the river — that represent local native lands.
The mound, formed out of 50,000 truckloads of nearby river basin soil, leads visitors on a clockwise procession through time and space. The pathway, ascending toward the heavens, starts at “beginnings” at ground level, then confronts the museum, which represents tribes’ encounter with nonnative civilization, and continues rising to “futures,” celebrating what is to come. In the center of the mound is the Festival Plaza, which hosts myriad events and celebrations, and along its edge is the Solstice Passageway, a tunnel that lines up with winter solstice sunsets.
The museum’s glassy, semicircular Hall of The People, which commemorates the region’s tribes and memorializes their expulsion from their original lands, was shaped to fit into the mound itself, and rusted steel fins shading the museum’s galleries are designed to echo the reddish color of the mound’s soil.
Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts
The architect Jeanne Gang and the landscape architect Kate Orff (and their respective firms, Studio Gang and SCAPE) worked together on the transformation of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts) in Little Rock, which opened last spring. The two have known each other for more than two decades, and think together, noted Orff, in an informal process of joined brain power. “We have this kind of hive mind,” she said. And it shows.
The design unifies what was a cluttered museum and enlivens it with distinct, flexible and very usable landscapes that are ultimately connected to the city’s MacArthur Park, with its massive oak trees, through 2,200 feet of new paths and a diverse matrix of more than 250 new trees, which are already merging with the existing canopy.
To the north, the porous building’s new “cultural living room,” a raised community event space with tendril-like, dramatically upturned eaves, frames a formal courtyard. To the south a new cafe reaches out to an outdoor dining pavilion, which has replaced an asphalt parking lot.
This area, further inspired by the museum’s plantlike form, features a series of petal-shaped storm-water gardens, incorporating precast concrete seat walls and sandstone “splash pads,” which reach upward to capture runoff from the building’s folded-plate roof. The gardens are planted with a mix of water-tolerant perennials and native trees that sustain insect and bird populations.
From the East Coast to the West
The ascension of landscape in the museum world shows no signs of abating. The list of ambitious undertakings on the horizon goes on and on, like the Calder Gardens in Philadelphia, in which the Dutch designer Piet Oudolf is creating a sculpture-filled landscape leading visitors through a meadow, underground spaces and a four-season garden.
At Dia Beacon in Beacon, N.Y., the landscape design firm Studio Zewde will convert more than three acres of lawn to native meadowlands containing more than 90 Indigenous plant species and 400 new trees and shrubs.
In Los Angeles, the roof of the fluid, hovering Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, with building design by MAD Architects and landscape design by Studio-MLA, is now being planted with hills of native grass and flowers that will bloom in revolving cycles throughout the year. The building will be surrounded by a varied 11-acre landscape, open to the public — thus serving an important role in park-starved South Los Angeles.
Just across the street, Studio-MLA designed (with CO Architects) the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County’s Nature Gardens, showcasing an array of plants and landscapes curated with the museum’s scientists. And the firm, working with Frederick Fisher and Partners, is now helping design NHM Commons, a new wing featuring a planted plaza anchoring the institution’s rather lonely south side.
Even the old-fashioned sculpture garden is experiencing a rebirth. In 2026, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., will open the artist and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto’s somewhat controversial transformation of the sculpture garden created by the architects Gordon Bunshaft and Lester Collins in the late 1970s. The project will, among other moves, add shade from new trees and plants and enlarge the reflecting pool (and allow it to be drained and used as a stage for events). It will also better connect the museum to the National Mall, a major priority for growing attendance and relevance, through a widened entry, grade changes, the removal or lowering of walls, and the restoration of a below-grade connector to the museum. The project will also significantly increase the garden’s size and its variety of outdoor spaces, accommodating broader and more current displays of art along with a greater range of events.
“We started to rethink what a sculpture garden could be for the 21st century,” said Melissa Chiu, the Hirshhorn’s director. “We’ve tried a lot of different ways of engaging audiences that go beyond placing works of art in the museum,” she added. Obviously, they’re not alone.
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