Clark Art Institute

The Clark Art Institute’s 140-acre campus in western Massachusetts is a treasured natural resource and a hard working community commons. Our work enables the landscape to work even harder — restoring ecological systems, reducing its environmental footprint, expanding public access to this expansive landscape, and enhancing the Clark’s capacity to realize its educational mission at the intersection of art and nature. Today the landscape is a central part of The Clark's collection and home to its influential annual outdoor art exhibition, Ground/work.

Art and Nature

The Clark’s mission explicitly links the interpretation of its collection, the experience of its pastoral context, and the generation of ideas. Prior to our work, however, museum visitors and scholars experienced only a small fraction of the campus. It was mostly understood as a passive backdrop in which to view art. In 2001 the Clark Art Institute assembled a multi-disciplinary team to reconceive its campus with the landscape at its center. Working directly for the Clark, from master planning through construction, we shaped a welcoming and harmonious landscape that connects the built and natural environment and unifies new powerful works of architecture by Tadao Ando and existing buildings restored by Annabelle Selldorf with Gensler as architect of record. We continue to work with the Clark to steward its landscape 25 years later.

Ground/work

Each year the Clark now curates a site-specific outdoor art exhibition that responds to and heightens the experience of the landscape.

Taking cues from the scale and texture in the extraordinary Berkshire context, we built a robust and expressive set of landforms, meandering drives that hug and accentuate the hillsides, and over 2 miles of pathways and trails to reintroduce visitors to the Clark's campus. Together these interventions embed the architecture — new and old — in a context with an identity and scale larger than the buildings themselves.

After a campus plan originally developed in 2001, for the project's first phase, completed in 2008, we situated the Ando-designed Lunder Center in a grassland clearing on a hillside articulated with gathering terraces and crisply defined slopes. Uniting this new home for the prestigious Williamstown + Atlanta Art Conservation Center with the rest of the museum landscape, the plan allows visitors to arrive via an extensive path network that crosses restored streams and grassland passages, and woodland edges, and brings visitors to intimate overlooks with panoramic views.

Phase 2 debuted in the summer 2014 with the opening of the new Clark Center by Tadao Ando and the reopening of the Museum Building, renovated by Annabelle Selldorf. The Clark Center and the Museum now face a one-acre tiered reflecting pool. The pool is more than a lens to frame views of the landscape beyond and to connect three-generations of architecture; it’s the functional centerpiece of a deeply connected water system linking foundation and roof drains, HVAC makeup, plumbing, and irrigation. We led an integrated design process with engineers of all stripes to ensure that the terraced reflecting pool save the Clark nearly a million gallons a year in potable water.

As a high performing hydrological system and a compelling place to gather, the landscape is truly the centerpiece of the Clark's dedication to renew and sustain the remarkable natural and cultural landscape that makes the Berkshires a destination for visitors from afar and for those closer to home as well.