Unless they have been signed by a mischievous surrealist, it is not often that toilets qualify as works of art. But at theStorm King Art Center, an outdoor sculpture park that rolls across 200 edenic hectares of New York’s Hudson Valley, visitors are now treated to a sublime restroom experience worthy of the spectacular sculptures on show.“It’s quite an upgrade from our porta-potties,” says Nora Lawrence, director of the centre, which has just reopened after a $53m (£39.7m) expansion. She is standing outside the new loos, housed in a sleek wooden pavilion that opens out on to the woodland landscape, framing views of the red maple swamp beyond. A new ticket office stands across a tree-lined “outdoor lobby”, while elegant lampposts line the route to an open-air welcome pavilion, sheltering lockers and phone charging points.
Storm King had none of these things before. Founded in 1960, on a ravaged landscape of gravel pits left by neighbouring highway construction, the sculpture park never had the facilities you would expect from such a popular visitor attraction, which draws crowds of 200,000 each year. Named after a local mountain, the art centre began as a small museum of local landscape paintings, housed in a 1930s Normandy-style chateau on a hill here in Mountainville, surrounded by 23 acres. Its founders, Ralph E Ogden, and his son-in-law, H Peter Stern, who co-ran the family business manufacturing steel bolts, soon acquired a taste for outsized sculpture, and, as a consequence, an appetite for more land. Their holdings eventually grew to include 800 hectares of the adjacent Schunnemunk mountain – which Ogden bought to preserve the woodland backdrop, then donated to become a state park.Storm King now boasts one of the world’s greatest collections of outdoor sculpture, with more than 100 works by 20th-century greats, but it has always lacked electricity, piped water, and most of the other hallmarks of civilisation. Alexander Calder’s 17-metre tallThe Archstands in the middle of a meadow like some prized fowl, flaring out its curved black limbs with haughty pride.Mark di Suvero’s trioof colossal steel structures march across the hills, rising on the horizon like abandoned oil derricks, mineshaft headframes or rusting contraptions once used to sculpt the land. Isamu Noguchi’s 40-tonnegranite peachnestles in a woodland clearing nearby, looking positively modest in comparison, while Andy Goldsworthy’sdrystone wallwinds its way for 700 metres between the trees. But in between admiring these wonders, visitors were treated to the delights of portable plastic toilets and crowded parking lots.In true North American fashion, Storm King had a lot of asphalt. Swathes of parking and access roads sliced across the pristine meadows, and muscled into the foreground of the striking steel sculptures, undermining the intention of experiencing art against a backdrop of pure nature.
“The primary visitor experience was sitting in a long line of traffic and finding somewhere to park your car,” says Claire Weisz ofWXY Studio, the architects that have led the project, with Irish firm Heneghan Peng, since 2017. “We’ve tried to let the landscape take over again.”Working with New England landscape practiceReed Hilderbrand, and London firmGustafson Porter + Bowman, the team have torn up over two hectares of asphalt, creating new fields for the display of art, and planted more than 650 trees and shrubs. They have opened up a previously culverted stream, revealing 100 metres of babbling brook, and restored the wetland landscape with sour gum, sweetgum and flowering dogwood, promising a ravishing show of scarlet foliage come the autumn. With much of the tarmac swept away, the colossal outdoor works shine like never before so the new architectural interventions take a back seat, letting the landscape be the real star of the show.Visitors arrive at the newly concentrated 580-space parking lot, where an elegant timber ticket office has been deftly tacked on to the end of a 19th-century stone cottage, shaded by a big projecting canopy. “It replaces a 1950s garage extension,” says Róisín Heneghan, “so we made the canopy look like a big open garage door, in a nod to the American garage sale tradition.”
The outdoor lobby, framed by tall, shading sweetgum trees, leads to the new bathroom block, where top-lit wooden cubicles snake in a subtle S-curve, crowned with a floating roof that shelters a long open-air concrete sink. The roof appears to be supported by a row of swivelling wooden shutters, which can be closed in the cooler months, or swung open to connect you directly with the wooded wetland beyond. The architects say they were inspired by the outdoor washbasins of Japanese temples, and there is a similar sense of ritual ablution here, a spiritual cleansing in preparation for the aesthetic revelations that await. For once, the American term is fitting: these are restrooms where you might indeed want to rest awhile, take in the view, and enjoy the aroma of the allspice shrubs, planted, says Beka Sturges of Reed Hilderbrand, “as a celebration of sanitation”.Sturges says her firm is often accused of being too deferential, but here that’s exactly what was needed. Their work is almost invisible: few visitors will remember the previous nightmare of car parks, or realise that a long allée of dying maples has been replaced with more resilient tupelo trees, or that new ground-cover and perennials were selected for their climate resilience. “We’ve tried to interlace a few southern species, where this would be the northern edge of their historic range,” says Sturges, “just to try to get ahead of the terrifying change to climate.”
There has also been a lot of work behind the scenes, which most visitors will never see. A new southern logistics entrance means that delivery trucks and maintenance vehicles no longer have to ply their way across the park, disturbing visitors’ reverie. It leads to a new conservation, fabrication and maintenance building, conceived as a big black hangar, cut into a sloping hillside. Here, beneath the six-metre high ceilings, cooled byBig Ass Fans, sculptures can be repaired and repainted in a 15-metre long spray booth, before being wheeled out through full-height doors. It means that work that used to have to be outsourced, entailing more truck deliveries, can now be done on site, while the action can be surveyed from mezzanine offices overhead.It is where the big steel buttresses for a newtemporary installation by Kevin Beasleywere fabricated, which now stand on Tippet’s Field – a prominent new space reclaimed from one of the bigger parking lots – forming a 30-metre long theatre arch of found fabrics suspended in resin. Beasley plans to activate the work with performances this summer, the first test of this grassy stage as a canvas for whatever the next generation of artists will dream up. As Lawrence puts it: “It’s quite unusual for an artist to be told, ‘Here’s a huge landscape, go to town!’” And that’s where Storm King’s magic lies – now with more potential than ever.