(history continued)

Halprin's sculpture garden was an integral part of the Virginia Museum's North Wing expansion project. According to a January 1976 VMFA Press Release, the new facility included "a public cafeteria, expanded Member's Suite, 450-seat lecture hall, three additional galleries, a large Council Sales Shop, multi-purpose rooms, and a 99-seat Orientation theatre." So integral was the garden that the press releases and articles regarding the North Wing opening, never mentioned or dealt with the garden as a work of art unto itself. It was regarded as an outdoor construct to accommodate, under the sky and stars, "a variety of settings for sculpture and reflecting pools, and was designed to take advantage of the finest of the great old trees in the area." Because "the North Wing was also planned to serve as the principal entrance into the Museum" the design was "planned to relate building and garden as intimately as possible."

Inherent to Halprin's sculpture garden is metaphor, which unfolds into a complex combination of sensory and visual experiences. As a focal point anchoring the garden layers to the ground plane, an extraordinary fountain simultaneously reinforces the symbiotic relationship between garden and building, as well as landscape and art. The fountain's sculpturally knit grouping of rectangular limestone blocks rising up from a shallow reflecting pool was precisely scaled to embrace Aristide Maillol's sculpture "The River", purchased by the museum in 1970 with anticipation of eventual placement within the new outdoor space.

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