Louisville’s Speed Outdoors sets contemporary art amid a new Reed Hilderbrand landscape. 

By Mark R. Long 

The Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, is employing landscape architecture and urban planning to broaden its audience and help fill a gap in green space for its urban neighbors, transforming its grounds into an always-open art park that will display more than a dozen sculptures by the likes of Zaha Hadid, Sol LeWitt, and Deborah Butterfield. Scheduled to open in late 2025, the Reed Hilderbrand–designed green space will feature furniture and spaces for people to walk, relax, dine, study, and enjoy cultural programs amid expanses of new plantings, shaded by 150 new native trees.

Showcasing 13 contemporary sculptures is a means for the $22 million Speed Outdoors project to draw people from all walks of life into the space, free of charge, says Raphaela Platow, the director of the Speed, Kentucky’s biggest and oldest art institution. “I felt really strongly that if we embark on a big landscaping project, that we have to build a park for the community and for our adjacent neighborhoods,” she says.

Despite its large, celebrated system of parks and parkways designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and his firm in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many Louisvillians—especially those with lower incomes—are short on green space. A recent equity analysis from the nonprofit Parks Alliance of Louisville found that communities around the Speed and the University of Louisville have some of the greatest need for open space in the city.

Leslie Carter, ASLA, a senior associate at Reed Hilderbrand, says several kinds of oak, Kentucky coffee trees, sweet gums, serviceberry, and other native species will be planted that will support wildlife and beneficial insects. “It’s not exclusively native, though. We have to balance what’s native versus what will really thrive in certain conditions,” she says, such as a nonnative elm for a paved area.

In addition to emphasizing native plants, the project will connect to a cistern system to keep rainwater out of the city’s burdened sewers, Carter says. She and Platow said the museum’s decision a few years ago to postpone major landscape work in favor of additional work on a new, Kulapat Yantrasast–designed annex building allowed them to study how the space was used by the public and thousands of students who traverse the grounds each day. “We did circulation diagrams that almost look like a Plinko game, of how people move through and not always in a straight line,” Carter says, adding that the aim is to get people to spread out and slow down to enjoy the furnishings under the new canopy of trees.

The Speed Outdoors is just one facet of a larger suite of related projects in the area. The museum isn’t officially part of the university, but the Speed’s location at the northern end of the main campus, south of downtown and Old Louisville, means the project is coordinated with the university’s larger land-use planning process. And full realization of the Speed Outdoors vision will require pending approvals and funding for city and state efforts to reconfigure roads in front of the museum to improve pedestrian safety and open green space.

The museum also plans to add security staffing, new lighting, and cameras for the 24-hour space. The particular vulnerabilities of the sculptures and furniture are considered in the landscape design, Carter says. Delicate pieces will be placed on plinths or amid plantings close to the museum building, other more durable ones will be farther out in the landscape, and “some are right in the courtyard where people are encouraged to interact with them.”