As assets go, a museum’s collection is its greatest. By 2000, the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh (NCMA) needed a larger home for its growing collection, which includes Homer, Bierstadt, Giotto, and Giacometti. In planning to move the permanent collection to a new building, which was completed in 2010 by the architecture firm of Thomas Phifer and Partners with Pearce Brinkley Cease + Lee, the museum incorporated its other great asset into the expansion plan: a 164-acre site between Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill.

Material Culture: Lappas+Havener and the North Carolina Museum of Art Draw Up New Rules for Art’s Ecology. Published by Landscape Architecture Magazine and the American Society of Landscape Architects (2011). Unavailable online, but reprints available for purchase; full text reproduced below.

By William Richards

As assets go, a museum’s collection is its greatest. By 2000, the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh (NCMA) needed a larger home for its growing collection, which includes Homer, Bierstadt, Giotto, and Giacometti. In planning to move the permanent collection to a new building, which was completed in 2010 by the architecture firm of Thomas Phifer and Partners with Pearce Brinkley Cease + Lee, the museum incorporated its other great asset into the expansion plan: a 164-acre site between Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill.

The firm Peter Walker and Partners (PWP) was originally hired by NCMA in 2006 to design the landscape around the new addition, working with the Durham firm of Lappas + Havener. Walker completed schematic designs for the museum’s grounds, which included several elements that survive today, including an entry allée and a series of reflecting pools meant to mirror the building’s planes. But Walker left the project in 2007 (museum officials and members of the design team have been rather reticent to discuss this issue), and the museum turned to Lappas + Havener to complete the design. For the museum and sculpture park, Lappas + Havener developed a design for the entire site, from a series of formal sculpture courts around Phifer’s new West Building outward to a looser, pastoral sculpture park that follows an existing greenway. “The interpretation of nature in the more rural part of the site is the framework for this museum landscape,” says Walt Havener, ASLA, the principal designer. “We’ve taken the rolling topography [of the greenway] and intensified it around the museum in terms of landforms and drainage.”

It’s a topography Lappas + Havener knew better than just about anyone. The firm has been involved with the museum since the early 2000s, before Walker’s or Phifer’s arrival in Raleigh, and had completed an early site plan for the museum’s property. The firm’s scheme for the bioretention pond that now sits southeast of the museum buildings also dates from this period.

Since 1983, NCMA operated out of an ungainly brick bunker designed by Edward Durell Stone and completed after his death. The building had major problems from the beginning. It came in way over budget, so many of its galleries had to be cut and the collection hung wherever there was wall space—including spaces along the walls of a cavernous atrium. Stone’s original scheme included a series of Babylonian terraces that were also value engineered out in the end, making it appear as though the museum—shrunken and denuded—had haplessly landed in a mowed field.

The plan for Phifer’s 127,000-square-foot West Building is a central hall with five galleries that spiral away from its spine. It’s a highly orthodox grid, to be sure, that orders the building’s structure as well as your movement. Everything seems to snap to a line. Within that framework, five exterior courts open in the spaces between extruded galleries—some are long and thin; others are foreshortened and broad. Each gallery is programmed in concert with an elemental focus—on stone, water, or reeds—and conspicuously named for donors.

On the west is Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Court and Garden which is bisected by a big reflecting pool and forces you to approach its Rodin bronzes and bamboo canes in a roundabout way. On the north is Bryan Court, which is more of a ramble among perennial beds and Chinese elms. Bryan Court also contains two sculptures that are notable: Robert Bladen’s Three Elements, which slices diagonally across the court to break an otherwise monotonous grid, and Lappas + Havener’s black, poured-in-place concrete wall that defines the court’s western border. Striations in the wall, which are remnants of sand randomly distributed during the pouring process, rough up an otherwise sleek patio of granite pavers.

Phifer’s expansion has an entry plaza, but it doesn’t have a back side. The entire building and its sculpture courts can be reached by a meandering path through a grove of river birches, native meadow grasses, and fescue lawns. Because the museum does not charge admission, museum officials and the design team agreed that access to the galleries and courts does not have to be as highly controlled as it is at a museum that does charge. ”The porosity of this building is unique,” Havener says, “and because it’s a free institution, you can enter from four different points and have different paths and experiences through the landscape.”

On this walk around the Phifer building, two smaller courts appear as skinny incisions into the building’s cubic volumes: a pool to the east that uses black dye to enhance its reflectivity and a boulder garden to the south, which is dotted with six-million-year-old granite rocks from western North Carolina and grounded by beds of vinca and hellebores.

People arriving at the museum can see the South Court as they move down toward the entry plaza. In the larger scheme, each of these courts actually acts as a stage you’re supposed to view from the museum’s interior. Phifer’s interest in transparency plays out here in an almost voyeuristic way: The translucent sun shades that screen natural light into the museum also act as veils that blur the view out. The forms in each of the exterior courts—Rodins and rocks and so forth—appear in a soft white haze. You can detect people and sculpture outside, but the view in from one of these courts is obscured by these sun shades, and the courts effectively become stage sets.

The fifth court is the entry plaza, which brings you in from one of two skillfully hidden parking lots and governs the circulation for the entire complex. An American elm allée, which survived from Walker’s original scheme, defines the museum complex’s processional path and marks the entrance to the amphitheater and sculpture park, which includes a clever in-ground piece by the installation artist Barbara Kruger that’s largely imperceptible unless you are staring at an aerial photograph of the site.

The plaza acts as a hinge between conventional museum space and the landscape beyond. But it’s a creaky hinge. Even if it’s clear to someone standing in the plaza that the amphitheater is an obvious part of the museum experience, the sculpture park beyond is not as visually obvious. You have to walk the length of a football field and forge ahead over a bluff to reach it.

Once you do, though, you are greeted by Thomas Sayer’s Gyre, an enormous, three-ring gateway for the sculpture park’s meandering paths. One path leads to a belvedere and the other becomes the House Creek section of the Reedy Creek Greenway. “The sculpture park has a strong environmental education component to it, and bringing people through, via the greenway, is a way to stretch that message,” Havener says.

The sculpture park, which is open to the public, defines the southern half of the museum’s entire site. The paths, activated by site-specific pieces like Martha Jackson-Jarvis’s mosaic monolith Crossroads/Trickster I and Jim Gallucci’s twisted Whisper Bench, represent both museum programming as well as places to relax. Tongue-in-cheek picture frames hung along the wooded portion of the greenway (with a rotating series of paintings) are juxtaposed with small shelters such as Chris Drury’s Cloud Chamber for the Trees and Sky, which doubles as a camera obscura.

Although there is art throughout the whole site, Phifer and Lappas + Havener gave the museum experience a hierarchy that has to do with proximity to the museum proper. “The site is a bit like a French landscape,” Phifer says, “as things are very rough in the distance, and the closer you get to the chateau, the more precise things get.”

Phifer, Lappas + Havener, and NCMA worked to expand the visitor’s experience out of a concern for the museum’s continued relevance and a sense of environmental stewardship. They looked to precedents outside of France, like the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands and Yorkshire Sculpture Park in England. For the NCMA property, Lappas + Havener established a series of paths and spaces that lead the visitor from a highly scripted series of formal sculpture gardens around the Phifer building to a completely wild landscape.

“The parti is about an arrangement between nature and art,” Havener says, “and the hand of horticulture and maintenance becomes more prevalent the closer you get to the building.”

Although the sculpture park is several hundred yards from the museum’s courts and plaza, the two spaces conceptually hang together. Stripping the sculpture park’s forest down to its most basic elements to reflect texture, color, and structure, Lappas + Havener inserted those elements back into the museum’s immediate landscape. Oak trees along the sculpture park’s ecotone reappear along the museum’s entry path and South Garden, as do the sculpture park’s native tall grasses.

Striations in the site’s hierarchy become apparent when you stand on a belvedere about 100 yards inland from the sculpture park’s entry bluff. Distant sculptures appear along the tree line before the southern edge of a pliant, no-mow meadow. A centurion smokestack (the remnant of a Civil War prison) stands to the west and paths dip down into the meadow, signaling three distinct paths that contain installation art pieces. Adjacent to the belvedere is a park pavilion by Raleigh’s Tonic Design with Mike Cindric, which signals the return path to the museum.

Along that return path, Lappas + Havener have designed a bioretention pond that manages surface water and HVAC condensate with a naturalized stormwater swale, a rock weir, a wetland garden, and a grove of bald cypress. The museum plans to use this area as part of its educational programming.

In a larger sense, NCMA finds itself in the unusual position of curating the equilibrium between old and new concepts of a museum experience: the scripted and the unscripted elements of site as well as art and nature. In its artifice, the pond is a vital way station for the building’s ecology, but it also draws nature closer to the more conventional museum spaces on the hill above.

There are other great sculpture parks in the United States—Storm King in New York or Laumeier in St. Louis come to mind—but how many pre-existing American art museums count the landscape among their prime assets beyond a sculpture court? How many even have a landscape to count?

The only other one that comes close is the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA). In 2010, the IMA opened its 100 Acres: Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park west of the museum proper, designed by the late landscape architect Edward Blake with the architect Marlon Blackwell. Like the NCMA, the IMA is advancing the idea that an art museum can include site-specific outdoor works in addition to painting and sculpture.

“Save for Indianapolis, there’s nothing like what we have here,” says Daniel Gottlieb, NCMA director of planning and design. “There are a lot of sculpture parks without our collection, and there are lots of collections without our relationship to the land.”

“There is a strong functional relationship between the museum and the land and there’s an educational and curatorial relationship,” Havener says. “But porosity and light are really what’s at the heart of this project. They’re integral to the building’s concept of nature in the building, and they guided our ideas about movement through the landscape.”

In a recent Artforum dedicated to defining the contemporary museum, the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson noted, “I like to distinguish between the museum as a reality producer and the museum as a reality container.” NCMA offers a postscript to this distinction as a place to house art and a place to interpret it. The museum has invited the landscape to be part of our conventional notions of a contemporary museum and, as an agent of art’s expansive definition, NCMA stands somewhere between exhibition, experience, and ecology.