US National Arboretum Framework Plan

The United States National Arboretum will redevelop its Core landscape, capitalizing on its cultural and ecological heritage in pursuit of a sustainable future to meet a rapidly growing constituency. In the context of a changing District, this project seeks greater expression for the National Arboretum’s mission of connecting people to plants in one of the city’s greatest open spaces. 

Framework Plan

Reed Hilderbrand’s framework plan recognizes the Arboretum’s distinguished legacy and preeminent reputation as the foundation of its identity and educational offerings. The proposed visitor experience of the Core is redirected, beginning as a sequence from a new entry at the Bladensberg Road, an urban thoroughfare. Visitors travel through site features that descend from its early history as a farm to its decades of development as a renowned scientific research facility focused on agriculture. A honed vehicular and pedestrian circulation system, supported by wayfinding, establishes clarity and hierarchy while reducing the amount of impervious pavement on the site. The new system brings visitors to expanded collections and visitor services at the Core, and to a myriad of new outlying destinations across the property’s uplands, midlands, and dendritic ravines. Strategic investment in the Core’s modernist compound provides opportunities to develop a visitor’s center where staff, volunteers, and visitors co-mingle to learn about plants, historic and new research findings, and current stewardship practices. 

The National Bonsai and Penjing Museum

The National Bonsai and Penjing Museum, set within the core of the U.S. National Arboretum, creates an immersive garden experience whose focus dances between the miniature and the panoramic, evoking a sense of awe and wonder.

The Museum establishes its identity through a sequence of fine concrete walls, blackened steel beam, a pervasive grove of understory trees. The walls organize a meandering path through the display and make available multiple orientations for the bonsai, an elegant, neutral backdrop that allows generous air circulation to mitigate heat.