Sherwood collaborated with Studio Zewde to reimagine an 8-acre parcel for the contemporary art museum Dia Beacon, creating new public access to this beautiful but previously unusable stretch of land and adding significant stormwater resilience to the site. The design celebrates the museum’s connection with history, nature and art with curvilinear earthworks that gesture to the land’s past as a significant river crossing for the indigenous Lenape community. These sculptural landforms also manage the site’s stormwater by creating basins that collect the water and protect the site and buildings from storm events and river backflow. As the berms rise across the lawn, 3 acres have been converted into native ecological meadows featuring nearly 400 new trees and shrubs.
Sited on the 32-acre site of a former Nabisco box printing factory, adjacent to the Hudson River in upstate New York, the museum was motivated to convert a portion of its land into an expanded outdoor public amenity. This goal, however, had to be balanced with the realities of the river’s rising waters and increasing severity of storms. When the land had previously been flattened for industrial use, the result was a soggy, bathtub-like topography that frequently flooded. The museum itself had taken in water during Hurricane Sandy. So the design team, led by Studio Zewde, sought to find ways to embrace the water within the landscape while managing the long-term challenge of rising water and mitigating the risk it posed to people and priceless art.
To ensure the native meadows and earthworks would function effectively, Sherwood mapped potential flooding patterns, calculated projections for sea level rise, and integrated subsurface detention, drainage and grading details with the new landscape architecture. The team’s efforts also included soil amendments that allow a new event lawn to drain quickly. The project is anticipated to be complete and open to the public in 2025.
