In 2018, Japanese architect and photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto was selected to refresh the lobby of Gordon Bunshaft’s brutalist Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. – one of 11 Smithsonian institutions to line the National Mall. Eight years later, Sugimoto has returned with an even more dramatic revamp of the contemporary art museum’s sculpture garden.
The project had several aims: to make the sunken space more visible; to shade it more effectively; and to showcase more art. This has all been accomplished in a scheme plotted out by Sugimoto’s architecture office, New Material Research Laboratory, in collaboration with New York-based YUN Architecture.
Sugimoto’s lobby work was a light and clever tweak of the Bunshaft original. The sculpture garden was different. The project, acting museum director Aaron Seeto stresses, is ‘a complete rethink. It is not just a renovation of an existing plan.’
The logic of the redesign makes full sense: The 1.3-acre sculpture garden has long been somewhat concealed, depressed up to 14 feet beneath the surface of the National Mall (a typically Bunshfatian balancing device: the Hirshorn’s circular museum volume begins 14 feet above street level). For the last several decades the garden has only had two entrances (a third, an original passageway under Jefferson Drive, has been closed since 1981). Sugimoto restored the shuttered entrance and widened the northern entrance, a move that’s been transformational, Seeto says: ‘It means that our front door is the National Mall,’ Seeto says.
Sugimoto acted in rough accord with Bunshaft’s original wishes for a larger reflecting pool with a scheme of two pools in the center, with the addition of a platform that can be used for performance in the centre, inspired by Noh theatre in Tokyo. Gunshaft also took inspiration from zen gardens, according to Sugimoto.
‘Having “void space” amid greenery is the essential precondition for a proper Zen garden. Placing a lifeless, empty space amid vigorously flourishing vegetation has the paradoxical effect of presenting the viewer with a powerful visualization of the concept of life,’ the architect said in a design statement.
There was one problem: Gunshaft’s garden didn’t have many plants. ‘While the original Bunshaft-designed garden succeeded in establishing this void space, I believe it was missing the surrounding green plantings,’ Sugimoto said.
The Smithsonian first realized this some time ago, commissioning a partial redesign by Lester Collins in 1981, which greened Bunshaft’s rather bare scheme. Preservationists have objected to the redesign largely for effacing these Collins elements. The Cultural Landscape Foundation classified the garden as ‘threatened.’ Sugomito’s intense attachment to new stacked stone walls were also the focus of particular critique for abandoning a central concrete element cohering with the museum’s form.
Sugimoto has unquestionably sought to complement Bunshaft’s museum in multiple forms, in a design that provides a considerably more dramatic forecourt for the museum. It has emerged somehow as both more comfortable and more monumental space, a conversation pit rather than a secret garden.
The stone walls, containing 950 tons of stone from Gloucester, Massachusetts, hand-stacked by Japanese stonemasons, are certainly attractive in themselves. The redesign has provided considerably more seating and shade, both welcome in Washington’s acutely miserable summer climate. Seeto says, ‘We want people to linger longer and to really use the space for contemplation of our extraordinary collection.’
Historic elms were retained at the garden’s perimeter, otherwise the architects, working with Rhodeside & Harwell landscape architects, have added 57 new trees, from American elms to Katsura cherry trees, and over 40,000 plants. Sugimoto’s aim was ‘the perfect forest’ with somewhat different characteristics in each spot.
An unambiguous benefit is a leap in the number of sculptures on display, which have risen from 35 to 60. Nineteen of these works have never been displayed at the museum. ‘There is a little bit of an art historical narrative. Our collection of Rodins have been presented as a kind of foundation to think through modern sculpture. Then it moves through history. Hirschorn had personal relationships with Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth and we have an amazing collection. We have created a gallery specifically for those two artists,’ Seeto explains.
Eleven new works were added to the garden, ranging from Woody De Othello, to Chatchai Puipia. Four of them are specific commissions. These include works by Izumi Kato and KAWS, plus a piece by Sugimoto himself, Passage of Reflectance – a stainless steel work nestled under the bridge between the museum and the garden that lends elegant volumetric accentuation to Bunshaft’s museum. Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree for Washington, a work created for the garden which incorporates a live dogwood tree has also returned.
Another new addition may bring to mind other activities in Washington: Danish sculptors Elmgren and Dragset have contributed Eight, a stainless steel work which fancifully evokes a backyard swimming pool turned on its side.
‘We have been asked if there’s a relation to other pools that have been tremendously infamous in Washington recently,’ Ingar Dragset jokes. ‘To that we have to say we planned this for four years. More than us commenting on reality, reality sometimes starts to comment on our pieces.’