In 1826, as Frederic Edwin Church was just entering this world, Thomas Cole was turning one part of it on its head. The painter had just completed a headline-making series of depictions of the Catskills that established America’s first homegrown style and Cole its founding father. Eighteen years later, Church joined Cole at his home on the western edge of the Hudson River to learn from the visionary, and over two years the pair would often ferry to its opposite bank and sketch on a hillside south of the city of Hudson, New York.
In 1860, newly married and an art-world luminary in his own right, Church purchased 126 acres of this farmland, for which he commissioned a Richard Morris Hunt-designed cottage orné. Six years later, he bought the adjacent hilltop and partnered with Calvert Vaux to erect a residence for luxuriating in the annexed site’s vistas. That fantastical and painstakingly orchestrated building, Olana, would not be fully complete until 1891, and Church continued expanding and landscaping the entire property as a Gesamtkunstwerk almost obsessively until his death in 1900.
The recently opened Frederic Church Center for Art and Landscape, realized by Architecture Research Office (ARO) in collaboration with Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects (NBW), bestows much-needed space at Olana State Historic Site to share Church’s story with the detail and nuance it deserves. And, thanks to its deeply considered design, visitors to this 4,500-square-foot gateway structure can better grasp the artist’s most ambitious project as he had intended.
Since Olana was plucked from potential destruction and transferred to New York State ownership in 1966, its namesake home, grounds, and vistas have advanced America’s preservation movement almost as profoundly as the Hudson River School impacted its art. For decades, a legion of public and private entities has worked to restore the 250-acre property and safeguard approximately 3,000 acres within its viewshed. Today, more than 200,000 people visit the Olana State Historic Site annually.
Yet, among its fiercest defenders as well as day-tripping guests, few enthusiasts have truly known Olana. In recent years, approximately 16% of public visitors have toured the property’s main residence; 90% engaged with just 1% of the total landscape. “I think asphalt is to blame,” says landscape architect Thomas Woltz of the gulf between attendance and immersion. The state-run site’s existing road system, which shuttled visitors to the rear of the house, he explains, failed to pique greater curiosity about Olana as a cultural landscape. The NBW senior principal adds that ecological progression since Church’s death exacerbated that shortcoming; reforestation of negative spaces “meant you had no opportunity to understand the depth of Church’s intention, to realize that you were a participant in the tableau.”
Woltz recognized this disconnect as early as 2014, when NBW was tapped to create a strategic plan for restoring Olana and improving its visitor infrastructure. The plan proposed an all-new visitors center that, besides accommodating storytelling, could simply give folks a place to comfortably orient themselves while awaiting a house tour. Perhaps more importantly, NBW steered the visitor center’s placement to the campus entrance on the state highway. Positioning the building here would encourage interaction with the far-flung woodlands, meadows, roads, and ancillary structures that Church conceived with the same meticu-lousness as Olana itself. Because Church had never envisioned such a facility, Woltz explains, such siting allowed the building’s future architect to tuck it out of the viewshed from the Ombra—an indoor-outdoor space that is arguably Olana’s signature room.
“Visibility was something we worked hard to study in terms of siting the building, along with its massing, scale, and height,” ARO Principal Kim Yao says of shepherding the conceptual diagrams to a full-fledged design. In turn, the single-story volume as realized is wedge-shaped in plan, and wrapped in red cladding that subtly reinterprets traditional board and batten. The center’s massing and skin reference the structures of Church’s farm complex; overtures toward replication they are not. A slight fold in the building’s north elevation and a similar twist in its cantilevering roof are soft yet assured expressions of our time. “It has a very engaging dynamism,” observes Woltz, who quickly notes another parameter that could have thwarted a less confident design team: “This is a miracle on a tiny budget.”
Woltz’s positive reflections carry significant weight, not only because he participated in architect selection, but also because ARO’s work is so keenly integrated with NBW’s treatment of the surrounding landscape. (He says he would “walk through fire for ARO.”) Consider that inflection in the north elevation, which reconciles the interface of the building, its parallel parking lot, and the planted circulation between them. The gesture also coaxes exterior pedestrian movement toward the east elevation, where NBW created an outdoor terrace and amphitheater that feels almost indivisible from architecture by way of those broad eaves.
The Frederic Church Center for Art and Landscape is its own total work of design, which invites further exploration—leading perhaps to discovery of the project’s own multiple dimensions, such as its all-electric performance and use of cross-laminated timber, and certainly of Olana more widely. “It’s a portal to a larger experience,” says ARO Principal Adam Yarinsky, who adds, “Engagement with existing fabric is not a constraint but a really interesting way of calibrating your formal and conceptual approach to architecture.”
“The site and the architecture belong at Olana,” Woltz asserts. “They’re living in a 21st-century world, but they haven’t forsaken their heritage. They’ve embraced it and turned it into something else.”
DAVID SOKOL (“Street Level”) is a Hudson Valley-based design journalist whose Oculus assignments go back 23 years. His recent books include Hudson Modern and Hamptons Modern, both published by Monacelli, as well as collaborations with Workstead, Desai Chia, and Debbie Millman. He contributes regularly to Dwell, where he helped launch its “Deep Dive” vertical, and to Architectural Digest.
