In association with a significant building expansion at the museum designed by Ennead Architects, the Peabody Essex Museum commissioned NBW to design a new 3,700 sf garden. The mission of the Salem, Massachusetts-based institution is to celebrate outstanding artistic and cultural creativity by collecting, stewarding, and interpreting objects of art and culture in ways that increase knowledge, enrich the spirit, engage the mind, and stimulate the senses.
The NBW design was inspired by the museum’s maritime history and ongoing curatorial practice engaging its collections within contemporary frameworks.
The garden transports visitors through a three-room journey defined by plants, water, and stone. Drawn from nature and global natural systems, including Atlantic Ocean currents, winds, and the rhythms and patterns of tidal estuaries, sinuous form is re-imagined as a flat ribbon of stone that meanders out from inside the atrium and through the garden, inviting one to explore the three distinct garden rooms — a Native garden, an Asiatic garden, and a Hybrid Convergence garden, speak to the diversity between cultures and the exchange of knowledge and cross-pollination at the heart of the museum.
Two fountains activate the space and celebrate the visual and aural qualities of water, as well as its symbolic link to the museum’s collections. An inset slab of Massachusetts stone in the building’s facade, mimics the turbulent waters at the Cape of Good Hope — the museum’s roots are in the East India Marine Society, an organization of Salem captains and supercargoes who had sailed beyond either the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn. A thin stream of water shatters and flows over this 11-foot-tall, six-foot-wide piece of Chelmsford Granite over contours that recall oceanic current patterns.
The Poetry Fountain references an ancient Chinese garden water feature where two lovers would communicate by floating a message down a runnel of water to their partner at the other end. Water flows from source basins at either end and pools together into a single convergence basin, celebrating the meeting of Eastern & Western cultures at the juncture of a major garden path where integrated seating allows visitors to enjoy the visual and acoustic effects.
The new garden deepens the visitor experience by inviting personal reflection and consideration of wider cultural connections. Through its layered design and symbolic use of materials, it becomes not just a place of beauty but a contemplative threshold between art, nature, and global exchange.
