The Brandywine Conservancy & Museum of Art in rural Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania—both an organisation devoted to American art and a land trust founded in 1967—has selected the architecture firm Kengo Kuma & Associates, in partnership with the landscape architects Field Operations and Schwartz Silver Architects, to transform its 15-acre campus into a 325-acre public preserve and garden anchored by two museum buildings.
The estimated $100m project includes construction of a new freestanding 40,000-sq.-ft museum building, expected to break ground next spring and open in autumn of 2029, and renovation of its existing museum, a converted 19th-century grist mill along the Brandywine Creek. A new system of walking trails, to be introduced to land owned by Brandywine but not previously accessible to the public, will connect the two museum buildings in a bucolic ten-mile loop with the original studios of the artists N.C. Wyeth and Andrew Wyeth—two titans of the prominent artist family that has lived and worked in the Brandywine Valley for 130 years.
“We love the idea that visitors will be able to see works by the Wyeth family hanging in the gallery and then just walk over to where a lot of that art was created,” Thomas Padon, the director of the Brandywine Museum of Art, tells The Art Newspaper. The two historic studios, gifts to Brandywine from the Wyeths, are currently open by reservation only and via shuttle bus.
To date, Brandywine has raised almost 50% of the project’s estimated cost, including contributions from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art and individual Wyeth family members…