The Great Outdoors: Sculpture Gardens

Annie Block, Mark McMenamin, and Meghan Edwards -- Interior Design, 8/1/2009 12:00:00 AM

LED-lit, computer-controlled water jets at St. Louis's Citygarden by Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects.

If you crave art alfresco, take Petula Clark's cue: Go downtown. The latest crop of sculpture gardens is sprouting smack-dab in city centers, weaving the work of international artists into untold numbers of lives.

Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects—which also designed the Flight 93 National Memorial in Somerset County, Pennsylvania—carved 3 acres out of downtown St. Louis to create Citygarden, a matrix of water features and green spaces populated by 24 notable sculptures by the likes of Mark di Suvero and Martin Puryear. In Toronto, neglected railway yards are well on their way to becoming the 8-acre CityPlace Park, conceived by Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg as a "library" of national icons. And as if developing a master plan for Des Moines in the mid-1990's weren't enough, Agrest and Gandelsonas Architects returned to the heartland to design the Des Moines Art Center's 4½-acre John and Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park, where the work of Louise Bourgeois, Richard Serra, and 18 others debuts in September.