The Peabody Essex Museum Garden celebrates the spirit of curiosity, the discovery of the Museum’s origins, and the dynamic works of its collection, which span cultures, eras, and genres. To accompany its building expansion, the Museum commissioned the Landscape Architect to design a 3,700 square foot garden that builds off the Museum’s work of interpreting objects of art and culture in ways that increase knowledge, enrich the spirit, engage the mind, and stimulate the senses.
The design of the new Garden at the Peabody Essex Museum is inspired by the Museum’s maritime history yet has a contemporary focus. It transports visitors through a three-room journey from North America to Asia. The three garden rooms — a Native garden, an Asiatic garden, and a Hybrid Convergence garden — speak to the diversity between cultures, the exchange of knowledge, and the interdisciplinary innovation at the heart of the Museum’s mission and collection. The narrative is expressed through multi-layered mediums, including plants, water, texture, and material.
A fundamental design goal was to create a sense of the unexpected apart from the museum interior and collections. The space emphasizes the sensorial rather than the cognitive through the sound of flowing water, the movement and seasonal variation of the plants, and a variety in material textures. Situated at the terminus of the gallery atrium, the Garden provides a moment of pause and calm reflection, its sensorial moments juxtaposing the traditional experience of an art museum.
Drawn from natural and cultural patterns, including Atlantic currents and the rhythms and patterns of tidal estuaries, sinuous hydrological forms are re-imagined as a flat ribbon of stone meandering from inside the atrium and out through the Garden. Guiding visitors from the museum galleries to the Garden, the stone ribbon invites the exploration of three garden rooms and manifests the Museum’s dedication to the intersection of ideas and transformational art across cultures.
Two fountains activate the space and celebrate the visual and aural qualities of water and its symbolic link to the Museum’s collections and histories. As the Museum’s roots are in the East India Marine Society, an organization of Salem captains and supercargoes who had sailed beyond either the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn, an inset slab of Massachusetts granite in the building’s façade harkens to the turbulent waters at the Cape of Good Hope. A thin stream of water shatters and flows over this 11-foo…
Lastly, the Poetry Fountain references an ancient Chinese garden water feature. Traditionally, two lovers would communicate by floating a message down a runnel of water to their partner at the other end. In the Garden, water flows from source basins at either end and pools into a single convergence basin. Integrated seating on opposite sides of this central basin invite visitors to enjoy the visual and acoustic effects.
This new Garden furthers the Museum’s mission and serves to broaden visitors’ perspectives, attitudes, and knowledge of themselves and the wider world. A highly sensorial experience that in turn broadens the Museum’s interactive experiences.
Project Typology:
Museum, garden
• Architecture offices involved in the design:
Ennead Architects
• Other credits:
George Sexton – Lighting Design
Thomton Tomasetti – Structural Engineer
Nitsch – Civil Engineer
CMS Collaborative – Fountain Consultant
Northern Designs – Irrigation Designer
Pine & Swallow Environmental Services – Soil Consultant
https://maps.app.goo.gl/gMYsBz9LXnWbPUxN6
