The Morgan Library’s urban campus landscape design emerges as the fabric that binds Renzo Piano Building Workshop’s new pavilions with the Library’s historic buildings. New transparent connections to the surrounding gardens link the exterior with the interior public spaces as never before. HM White’s visually coherent landscape vocabulary reinforces this blurring of building and site intersections.

Slender, native Paper Birches frame both the Madison Avenue entry pavilion and the south garden’s gallery pavilion. Their arrangement and form becomes a repetitive device to help merge historic structures with the new. The interior “Piazza” is punctuated with a specimen Ficus tree layered against an exterior Bamboo grove backdrop within a new side garden – formerly a service yard. Set within an ochre crushed stone fine surface, the Bamboo is sustained above subterranean space and reads as “false-ground.” To further complete a cohesive urban campus composition, the surrounding streetscape was reinforced with a unified street tree planting that gives form to the Library’s vibrant urban neighborhood context and extends its sense of campus further into the public realm.

AIA New York Chapter
Honor Award 2006