Olana Frederic Church Center for Art & Landscape
The new Frederic Church Center for Art and Landscape is a state-of-the-art, sustainable center that welcomes and orients local and global visitors to the Olana State Historic Site. Located near Hudson, NY, Olana was the home, studio, farm, and culminating masterpiece of Frederic Edwin Church, the preeminent artist of the 19th Century Hudson River School of landscape painting.
The 4,500 SF building is the linchpin of landscape architects Nelson Byrd Woltz’s award-winning Strategic Landscape Design Plan for the entire 250-acre site. As an interpretive threshold to Church’s vision of Olana as a work of art uniting nature and culture, the Center’s design orients visitors to the immersive experience of the landscape.
Conceived as an indoor-outdoor space, the new building deepens the public’s connection to the historic site’s landscape and architecture and supports growth in attendance with ticketing, display areas, a multipurpose room, café, restrooms, parking, outdoor terraces, and connecting paths.
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Olana's Frederic Church Center is one of the first public buildings in New York State to be constructed with mass timber. -
For the first time in Olana’s 55-year history as a public site, a cafe will greet visitors as they plan their day.
In the spirit of Church’s commitment to environmental stewardship, the all-electric building is also an exemplar of sustainability, integrating mass timber construction with glue-laminated wood columns and beams and cross-laminated timber (CLT) roof and wall panels (a first for a public building in New York State).
