Preservationists ready for battle over Hirshhorn Museum garden "revitalization"

Advocates for the preservation of modernist landscapes in Washington have taken on another fight. After beating back the National Geographic Society’s plan to demolish “Marabar,” the 1984 sculptural installation by Elyn Zimmerman on its campus, they are now battling the Hirshhorn Museum’s proposal to redo its sunken sculpture garden by the architect Gordon Bunshaft and the landscape architect Lester Collins.As the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. gears up to restore its existing Gordon Bunshaft-designed facilities, landscape preservation advocates have voiced concerns over parallel plans to alter and reconfigure a series of Lester Collins-designed gardens that surround the iconic circular structure. A renovation plan led by architect Hiroshi Sugimoto aims to completely reconfigure the garden areas that front the museum. Speaking with The New York Times, Charles Birnbaum of The Cultural Landscape Foundation asks, “Why are we applying a different set of standards to the landscape architecture than to the building architecture? We should have the same goals.”