Renewal and enhancement of the Clark Art Institute's  140-acre campus, achieved through a decade-long collaboration with Tadao Ando, Annabelle Selldorf, and Gensler, establishes a regional commons for the Berkshires, where art and nature meets daily life.

Rugged, pastoral, and beloved—the Clark's 140-acre campus of meadows, lawns, forest, ponds, and streams have gained devoted constituencies. Not only has the site been popular, the lands have historically functioned as Williamstown’s timber lot and as a prominent social destination for Williams College students. 

In 2001, director Michael Conforti selected Tadao Ando to conceptualize an ambitious expansion for the Institute. Shortly thereafter, Reed Hilderbrand joined as the landscape architect. Better access to and more meaningful stewardship of the campus was viewed as an essential complement to a museum whose collection focused intensively on art’s (and artists’) relationship to nature. Working with The Clark's stakeholders and a large design team, we developed a vision for this considerable landholding. 

Lunder Center at the summit of Stone Hill, completed in 2008, is home to galleries and the prestigious Williamstown Art Conservation Center. Reed Hilderbrand's work in Phase 1 developed circulation, arrival, and parking to unite the existing campus to Stone Hill Center. Visitors travel through an extensive path network over the expanded campus that incorporates terraces, grassland passages, restored woodland edges, and distant views.

Phase 2 debuted in the summer 2014 with the opening of Ando’s new Clark Visitor Exhibition and Conference Center and the Museum Building, renovated by Annabelle Selldorf. The Clark Center appears embedded in the rising landform at the base of Stone Hill. The Center adjoins the Museum via a terrace that frames a one-acre tiered reflecting pool. The pool is more than a lens to frame views of the landscape from below, though, it’s the center of a storm water management system relating the water feature to the performance of the entire campus landscape.