June 3, 2025
Storm King Takes the Parking out of Sculpture Park
Storm King commissioned a conceptual master plan from Venturi, Scott Brown in 2009 which provided general promptings but few specifics. Amy S. Weisser, deputy director of strategic planning and projects at Storm King explains, “that plan proposed a shift away from the automobile, but the question was how?”
The very pleasant solution was taking the parking out of the sculpture park, so to speak, shifting all of the parking to a single site near the new visitors’ facilities. Consisting of a gently terraced lot segmented by bioswales, the new space now accommodates rideshare, shuttle loops, and electric vehicle charging stations. The vital moment of tranquility now occurs while exiting your car before you engage with the art.
The next key threshold is in fact an absence—to purchase tickets, you don’t actually have to go in a ticket office. Architect Róisín Heneghan notes, “We thought everybody comes here to be outside; nobody wants to be inside.”
The welcome pavilions consist of two structures. First, there is a very modest ticket office—less than 500 square feet—that connects to the 1749 Scandrett house, utilizing a footprint similar to a prior extension. The restroom pavilion features stalls that are the only “interior” spaces a visitor might experience: All circulation otherwise remains outside, with paths that provide gentle routing towards the grounds. Claire Weisz, founding partner of WXY explains that their central drive to determine, “all of the ways we can avoid interior space and make a kind of architectural space that is not inside or outside.”
Heneghan adds, “the landscape effects the building and the building effects the landscape. So rather than describing the project as ‘that’s the building, that’s the landscape’ it’s all experience.”
The understated but sharp pavilions consist of Abodo (a thermally modified pine) cladding and concrete that contains native stone aggregate. The restroom pavilion is also permeable, featuring a corridor lined with operable shutters designed to provide open air during much of the operating season.
The dividend of the parking shift is a more seamless landscape for art, with two former lots covering about five acres transformed into newly landscaped areas. A streambed was exhumed from its culvert at the north meadow, where a bucolic dip reconnects wetlands to Moodna Creek. Subgrade from that lot was added to create about a four foot height rise at the other former lot, Tippet’s Field. It’s now a stage for Kevin Beasley’s new 100-foot-long installation PROSCENIUM | Rebirth / Growth: The Watch / Harvest / Dormancy: On Reflection.
The landscape architects added an assortment of new features accentuating natural tendencies—with some painterly tweaks. Beka Sturges, principal at Reed Hilderbrand, explains, “Things tend to be tall and straight when they’re on an upland. They get a little bit more sprawling and there’s a different set and forms and colors and shapes as you get down into wetlands…so we were playing with that a little bit.” These additions include Woodland Crocus and Wood Anemone bulbs and an understory layer of Redbud and Dogwood trees. Their larger planting scheme introduced a number of Red Maple and Black Tupelo trees, the latter especially suited to lower-lying sites.
Uses of these spaces aren’t fixed. Storm King has moved a number of pieces over time and might well do so here, but they’re certain to feature a much more interesting variations of steel than prior variations of sedan to hatchback-on-asphalt. Weisser explained, “You learn from artists using the space. Whether it will remain a temporary outdoor gallery or whether it will be the site for a future long-term installation, we don’t know yet.”
Roads remain throughout the site but some have been narrowed, and the grounds in general have benefitted from a decline in automobile traffic. “There was a time last fall where visitors were picnicking next to Calder’s Arch,” Weisser recalls, “they did not do that previously.” The grounds are no longer a Di Suvero Drive Through but a place for slower ambling.
The last structure of the Capital Project is one that visitors won’t see but from which they will benefit—a brand-new conservation, maintenance, and fabrication facility named after Director Emeritus David R. Collens.
Sculptures that are outdoors for their entire lives require intermittent touching up and repainting, and that work was previously done in an ad hoc fashion. Weisser explains, “Most of that had to be done in garages or outdoors under tarps. These were not ideal conditions—or anything near to ideal conditions.” Rain, humidity, wind, and even entombed insects could degrade paint quality which can now be restored under tightly-controlled coin the new facility. Weisser notes that there simply hasn’t been a lot of time to develop techniques for preserving 20th century sculpture. When it comes to the Collens building, “there isn’t really a precedent.”
The building, which is over 19,000-square-feet, is housed within a high-performance insulated metal panel enclosure, with the panels bunding sheathing, insulation, and a weather barrier all at once. It contains a 7,200-square-foot workroom that features industrial ventilation and a large paint booth. The trouble, as is visible from a distance, is the vast size of some of Storm King’s pieces. Tal Streeter’s Endless Column, its tallest at 69 feet, is nearly the height of two telephone poles. The paint booth was accordingly designed to remain open. Sculptures can be driven in, painted in halves, and returned bright for your next visit.
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