Kengo Kuma & Associates designs its first museum building in the US for Pennsylvania

Architecture studio Kengo Kuma & Associates and landscape design office Field Operations have released designs for a vernacular expansion to the Brandywine Conservancy & Museum of Art outside of Philadelphia, USA.

The project, designed in association with Schwartz/Silver Architects Inc, will consist of adding a new building to the Brandywine Conservancy & Museum of Art (Brandywine Museum), renovations to an existing mill building, and expanding the campus to a 325-acre public preserve.

According to the team, it is Japanese architect and Kengo Kuma & Associates founder Kengo Kuma's "first museum building in the US".

The museum building will consist of five interconnected volumes with pitched roofs that "peak in asymmetric profiles". They are shown clad in dark brown wood and covered with a metal roof.

It will be multi-level and spread out over the sloped site. Visitors will enter from a corner of the upper level and pass into the slim centre volume.

Two large galleries are located on either side of the building, with a smaller gallery off the lobby. Two more galleries will be located on the lower level, as well as a coffee bar and terrace that looks over the grounds.

"Our design seeks to honor the dynamic and evolving relationship between art and nature by creating a building that emerges from the landscape rather than imposing upon it," said Kuma.

Field Operations is set to expand the museum's current 15-acre campus to a 325-acre public preserve and garden, with a network of trails throughout the property.

Native plants will be used and boardwalks will run through wetlands. As the Brandywine Museum is also dedicated to conservation and in light of enivornmental advocacy for the surrounding Brandywine-Christina watershed, the landscape project will also be tied into the museum's programming through installations and outdoor classrooms.

The expanded campus is also designed to link the new museum building to an existing museum building, as well as the original Pennsylvania studios of landscape painters NC and Andrew Wyeth, which are under the museum's purview.

"The Brandywine Valley is a landscape of profound ecological significance, and our design for the expanded preserve and gardens seeks to reveal and celebrate both, while raising awareness of the essential, but often less visible, work of the Conservancy," said Field Operations partner Sarah Weidner Astheimer.

The expansion project also includes additional renovations to the original museum building, a converted mid-nineteenth-century grist mill which has undergone a series of structural and programmatic updates in recent years.

"We hope that visitors feel a meaningful sense of locale, following the footsteps of artists inspired by the place, immersed in histories, and surrounded by local materials, technique, and suffused forest light," said Kengo Kuma executive vice president Balázs Bognár.

Construction is planned to begin in Spring 2027, with the new building opening scheduled for Fall 2029.

Kengo Kuma & Associates recently added an arched entrance to a French cathedral and designed a hotel in Kyoto.

The images are courtesy Kengo Kuma & Associates

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