Civic Community, Mass Timber
ARO’s Visitors Center Unites Art, Nature, and Culture
Olana Frederic Church Center
New York’s Hudson River Valley was the site of the United States’ first flourishing arts scene in the 19th century—and painter Frederic Edwin Church was a primary figure in this movement. But his fascination with the region’s landscape proved too immense to be contained to his canvas, and he spent the last four decades of his life creating Olana, a 250-acre estate and an experiential work of art in its own right in Hudson, New York. The property, 100 miles north of New York City, is now operated by New York State Parks and the nonprofit Olana Partnership as the Olana State Historic Site.
Recently, Olana gained a new gateway: The new Frederic Church Center for Art and Landscape will serve as an entry facility for the site while preserving Church’s intention to unite art, nature, and culture. Designed by New York-based Architecture Research Office (ARO), the 4,600-square-foot, single-story glass-and-wood pavilion is the first mass timber public building to be completed in New York State, according to the architects. It’s located about half a mile south of Church’s house on a site identified by Charlottesville, Virginia-based landscape architects (and ARO collaborators), Nelson Byrd Woltz, as part of a comprehensive landscape master plan developed starting in 2014.
Early in design, the ARO partners identified mass timber as an essential element for the project. “This is a perfect example to demonstrate the beauty and technology within wood construction and to create a durable, robust, long-lasting building for New York State Parks and the Olana Partnership that would be easy to maintain and celebrate the use of the material in a project,” ARO Principal Kim Yao says.
Olana Frederic Church Center
Olana Frederic Church Center
Immersed in the landscape
The building provides orientation for visitors to the site: After entering the structure from the parking lot on its north side, visitors encounter a reception area with information and ticketing. To the east, there’s a café and large multipurpose room; to the west, public restrooms along with office and staff spaces. Outdoor terraces extend the multipurpose room to an outdoor amphitheater.
While primarily rectangular in plan, the walls and roof are subtly inflected to orient visitors east end to guide them to a spot in the landscape where they will get their first glimpse of the main house in the distance. Every element of the structure is used to lead viewers on this prescribed path, including a diagonal beam that rises toward the northeast corner of the structure in the multipurpose room. “The shaping of the roof line and sculpting that interior space as it opens towards the view is all part of the geometry,” Yao says.
Olana Frederic Church Center
Olana Frederic Church Center
The exterior is clad in glass and wood with the exposed structure visible inside and out: glulam columns and beams support CLT roof decking. All structural wood is Douglas fir; the typical span is about 35 feet, with a cantilevered exterior overhang that varies from about four to six feet. The building is arranged in 8-foot-wide bays with the CLT panels sized to match.
ARO conceived the building as an outbuilding to the main house, similar to those on the estate from Church’s era. “It’s purposeful and a means of experiencing this site, but not a destination in and of itself,” ARO Principal Adam Yarinsky says. But destination or no, care was taken to make sure it fits in: To make it match the area, the building’s wood cladding is painted to match the color that’s used on the nearby farm buildings.
By the time of his death in 1900, Frederic Edwin Church’s painted work had fallen out of favor. While his legacy as an American painter has long since been restored, his influence as “a proto-land artist artist,” as Yarinsky characterizes him, is still growing. With the new Olana Frederic Church Center for Art and Landscape, new generations will be able to access the 19th century painter’s landscape legacy—on canvas and off.
