ALAN KRACHMER
Every landscape-design project presents sitespecific challenges, but those challenges are compounded when you’re designing a new landscape for the National Mall in Washington, DC. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, opened in 2016 and set on a 5-acre tract near the Washington Monument, took decades to plan (including more than a dozen failed votes in Congress over its funding) and sparked a significant debate regarding the museum’s site on the Mall. To shape the landscape around the museum, Seattle firm Gustafson Guthrie Nichol (GGN) cultivated a design with the utmost social consciousness and aesthetic sensitivity. The site design aimed to mesh the building and its program, both physically and historically, with the broader context of the National Mall and its numerous monuments. At the same time, the landscape needed to be distinctive and uniquely linked to the museum; it had to extend the visitor experience outside by expressing the museum’s broad organizing themes of resiliency, spirituality, hope, and optimism. Myriad functional considerations had to be
juggled as well, including entry plazas and pathways that could accommodate millions of yearly visitors, and a secure perimeter around the site. GGN integrated the building, conceived of by its architects as a pavilion in a park, into the Mall by drawing on the design qualities of the adjacent Washington Monument and White House grounds and installing gently curved pathways and retaining walls, open lawns, and a diverse palette of trees, including many native to the Southeast. The two entries to the site are marked by a wide stone retaining wall to the north and a water feature to the south, juxtaposing the permanence and weight of stone with the ephemeral qualities of moving water. These thresholds symbolically link past, present, and future to reinforce the museum’s location—it is the last significant site to be developed on the National Mall—as a critical context for the story of the African American experience showcased within the museum itself. And every year in late winter, 400,000 crocus bulbs bloom across the lawn in a bright expression of hope and optimism made manifest through planting design. ❈
COLLABORATORS Architects: Adjaye Associates; Davis Brody Bond; The Freelon Group; SmithGroup JJR Water feature consultant: CMS Collaborative Structural engineers: Guy Nordenson and Associates; Robert Silman Associates Structural Engineers, DPC MEP engineer: WSP USA Civil engineer: Rummel, Klepper & Kahl General contractors: Clark Construction; H. J. Russell & Company; Smoot Construction Landscape contractor: Ruppert Landscape Stone installer: Rugo Stone
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