A noticeable trend of late seems to be for major art collectors to create their own private museums, much as their Enlightenment forebears did in the 18th century. Instead of Horace Walpole, Sir John Soane, or Thomas Hope, however, you have Alice Walton (of the Wal-Mart family) building a new museum in Arkansas, designed by Moshe Safdie; newsprint mogul Peter Brant and his wife, Stephanie, turning to Richard Gluckman of Gluckman Mayner to renovate a barn for art at their Greenwich homestead; and Don Fisher, who enlisted Gluckman to design a new museum for his collection in the Presidio in San Francisco. The list goes on.
Glenstone, a 125-acre estate in Potomac, Maryland, is different from its cohorts. The art museum is a new structure conceived as part of a residential compound designed by one architect, Gwathmey Siegel & Associates. The collector, a Forbes 400–ranked industrialist, had first turned to Charles Gwathmey, FAIA, to design a New York City pied-a-terre for him, and admired the way the architect had integrated his art collection into the setting. This led to the design of a new house on the Potomac, along with a plan for a semiprivate museum that would display works by Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Robert Ryman, to name a few of the impressive cluster of 20th-century artists represented among the owner’s holdings. (The museum, which is run by the Glenstone Foundation, is open by appointment.) The architects and the client worked with landscape architect Peter Walker and Partners to create a paradisiacal totality from scratch, with an extensive sculpture park embedded in a bucolic setting straight out of Capability Brown.
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