Speed Museum of Art, Storm King Art Center Highlight Landscape Architecture's Role Building Museums Now
Build Only What is Necessary: Realizing Mission through Architecture, Landscape, and Systems at Storm King Art Center featuring Reed Hilderbrand’s Beka Sturges with Amy Weisser, Storm King Art Center; Adrienne Hepler, Envoie; Oliver Meade, Buro Happold; and Claire Weisz, WXY
Storm King Art Center's first-ever capital project (opened May 2025) provides the outdoor art museum with a singular opportunity to amplify its vision of enhancing the visitor experience; protecting its art, landscape, and people; and advancing its program of art and nature. A diverse and collaborative team of design and project professionals embraced the mantra of "build only what is necessary" to provide necessary operational spaces--parking, ticketing, restrooms, group orientation, and facilities for conservation, fabrication, and maintenance--while prioritizing the visitor's journey through the landscape for art. To do so required programmatic clarity from the client, including standards for physical accessibility; an architectural team that closely interrogated building footprint, materiality, and detailing to create structures that match the integrity of the Art Center's collection; landscape design that efficiently shelters systems and increases biodiversity while intuitively guiding the visitor journey; and building systems that reduce operational maintenance and energy loads, facilitate the light-on-the-land ambition of the architecture, and move Storm King's campus toward a net-zero future. The session, presented by the leaders of the client, project management, design, and systems teams, will provide museum personnel and seasoned project specialists with new questions to ask to use financial and spatial resources efficiently and effectively.
A Place for Art, A Park for All: Landscape and Mission at the Speed Art Museum featuring Reed Hilderbrand’s Leslie Carter with Speed Museum of Art’s Tyler Blackwell and Catherine Surratt
Speed Art Park is a three-acre landscape expansion to the Speed Art Museum that opened October 2025 after a journey of fifteen years from conceptualization to realization. Free and ungated, Speed Art Park welcomes the greater Louisville community to engage with works of contemporary sculpture from the Museum’s collection while immersed in the cooling shade of 150 trees and ecologically rich plantings. This panel follows the project’s story through budget reallocations, delayed implementation, leadership changes, a pandemic, and other external setbacks. The extended schedule afforded the Museum and design team time to learn from the landscape and adapt the design to discovered uses, new priorities, and shifting needs. Even as the specific design evolved, original principles and ambitions for Speed Art Park endured.
Panelists representing museum leadership, curators, operations, and landscape architect explore what practices and approaches ensured the project's success. They evaluate a virtuous cycle of strong design, donor enthusiasm, stakeholder engagement, and board support as well as agile tactics by leadership and design team to sustain momentum. This new community amenity, with all its inherent programmatic and educational opportunities for the Speed to engage Louisville’s broader public, required the project team to build a deep understanding of the site and visitor experience. To create equitable access to art and nature, to promote wellness, and to shape community resilience, the Speed focused on fundamentals: universal accessibility, flexibility for diverse programming, and futureproofing. The Speed's story highlights opportunities and challenges for anyone involved with or considering a landscape activation project.
