Museums Embrace Their Grounds to Expand Their Physical Space

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.