Brandywine Conservancy announces $100 million Expansion
The Brandywine Conservancy, which owns the Brandywine Museum of Art, where the Wyeth family’s paintings are on permanent exhibit, has announced a $100 million expansion that will include a second museum, hundreds of acres of public gardens and 10 miles of walking and biking trails.
The Chadds Ford project will result in a transformation and expansion of the organization’s current 15-acre campus into a 325-acre public preserve and garden featuring 10 miles of trails bookended by the two museum buildings
When completed, the grounds will encompass both museum buildings and the original studios of N.C. Wyeth and Andrew Wyeth. The design includes significant renovations to the Museum of Art’s historic Mill building, which sits on the banks of the Brandywine River and suffered a major flood in 2021.
The renovations to the Mill building will add new educational and public programming spaces, including a studio classroom and an interactive exhibition dedicated to the conservancy’s environmental work.
Several existing galleries will remain in use, preserving the intimate viewing experience associated with the original museum while expanding opportunities for research, events, and scholarship through the institution’s archival centers.
The new museum will include a 4,000-square-foot gallery dedicated to the Brandywine Museum’s landscape paintings. Andrew Wyeth’s subdued style of landscape painting famously spawned the “Brandywine school” of landscape art carried out by many artists. The new museum will have a 1,000-foot gallery dedicated to Andrew Wyeth’s work and another 4,000-foot gallery featuring the artworks by five Wyeth artists across three generations as well as galleries for new exhibits by other artists.
Designed by the landscape architecture firm Field Operations, the 325-acre campus will offer ten miles of trails—more than double the trails in place now—including sections with a boardwalk that will travel through wetlands.
The expanded campus will be surrounded by native plants — a cornerstone of the Conservancy’s work — and will incorporate new interpretive signs highlighting the local ecology. The area around the new museum building will feature innovative stormwater infrastructure, integrating cutting edge tools for weather resilience into the joy of the museum experience.
The new museum has been designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates, in association with Schwartz/Silver Architects Inc. It consists of four wood-clad pavilions running along a central axis, with long, low vernacular roofs that peak in asymmetric profiles. This is the Japanese architect’s first museum building in the United States.
The design seeks to “emerge from the landscape rather than impose upon it,” embedding architecture within the wooded topography and seasonal atmosphere of the Brandywine Valley, Kuma explained.
As of this month, the Brandywine Conservancy says it has raised 50% of the estimated project’s costs, reflecting strong support from the project’s donors. Construction is planned to begin next spring, and the new museum is expected to be completed in the fall of 2029.
PHOTO/Courtesy Brandywine Conservancy
