The building is part of a plan to renovate the entire museum complex, set in 60 hectares of forested land near a small New England town.
Stone Hill Center is a small building erected on a hill above the main museum complex. Most of it is occupied by restoration workshops, but there are also two halls for temporary exhibitions.
The structure itself is a very simple compositional scheme: two bunk concrete "pipes" of rectangular cross-section with glazed ends joined together. Their elementary form is enlivened by two triangular terraced courtyards bounded by high walls with gate openings cut through them.
Ando uses light gray concrete, traditional for its buildings, as the main material of the Center, however, enlivening it in the interior with cedar wood of various shades, as well as the active use of glazing, framed in dark metal frames. The workshops are located on the first level of the building, the galleries are on the second, and the views opening through the huge windows turn the surrounding landscape into picturesque panels that are included in the spaces of the halls as works of art.
But the main property of the new building is its subtle connection with the natural environment. To surround it with greenery, more than 300 trees, mainly aspens, were planted, which hide the low building from visitors climbing to the top of the hill, passing along bridges and gentle steps. It can be seen among the clumps of trees when a winding path leads them to the wall of the building, forcing them to go around the building, go through one of the courtyards and finally go out to the entrance to the glazed lobby. From there you have to go up to the second floor - to the galleries - which you also want to go to the end: to an open triangular terrace, protruding into the space of the valley under the hill, like the bow of a ship. This creates a sense of directional movement, which is not often the goal of modern architects.
The Stone Hill Center is just Ando's first for the Clark Institute: by 2013, a new multifunctional structure and a mirror pond with four artificial waterfalls will appear next to the two reconstructed old buildings of the museum, all designed by this Japanese architect.
