The numbers sound like attendance figures at a major sporting event, not the opening of a sculpture garden. Nevertheless, during its inaugural week in January, more than 40,000 people visited Seattle’s new Olympic Sculpture Park, a former industrial site on the edge of Puget Sound transformed into an art space with works by Louise Bourgeois, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Richard Serra and others. Also launched, or re-launched, with much fanfare in the past few years are sculpture gardens at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Phoenix Art Museum and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. Given the attention lavished on sculptural museum designs by Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind, it seems fitting that sculpture gardens and those who design them should also achieve greater recognition.

Sculpture gardens range in size from vast parks like the 500-acre Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York, to compact urban settings like that of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The unifying quality is a sense of informality compared with indoor museum settings. According to John Bullard, director of the New Orleans Museum of Art, “Sculpture gardens provide a more welcoming environment. They encourage a direct dialogue between works and visitors. Children can run around in them.” Additionally, depending on the venue, visitors can do something not permitted in a museum—touch the artwork. “The essence of sculpture is to caress it,” says Bullard, and the opportunity for such interactions is one of the reasons his museum’s 5-acre Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden is popular.

The modern public sculpture garden was born in the late 19th century with the advent of public museums. In the United States, the first such garden was Brookgreen Gardens in Murrells Inlet, near Georgetown, South Carolina, founded in 1931 by Archer and Anna Hyatt Huntington, the latter a noted sculptor and the garden’s designer. However, the concept dates back to classical antiquity, according to Laurie Olin, a Philadelphia-based landscape architect who created the National Gallery’s sculpture garden. He says the first-century B.C. Roman historian Sallust, a contemporary of Julius Caesar, developed the prototype—extensive landscaped gardens that contained an impressive assemblage of iconic sculpture including the “Dying Gaul,” which is now in Rome’s Capitoline Museum.

Then as now, a key distinction of sculpture gardens is the obvious absence of climate control. Viewing sculpture outdoors, says Boston landscape architect Douglas Reed, involves “a dynamism of light, moisture and atmospheric conditions,” which alter with every visit, thus refreshing each experience. His current project, the 105- acre site at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, will be used to educate the public about nature and art. Olin, speaking of Sol LeWitt’s ziggurat- like sculpture “Four-Sided Pyramid” in the National Gallery’s garden, says, “Depending on how the light hits it, the sculpture appears all white, a combination of white and dark, then all dark.”

“The challenge of designing a sculpture garden is replacing the neutrality of the gallery with the complexity of nature,” says New York landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburg. Designing outdoor rooms that facilitate the type of compare-andcontrast relationship one has indoors is challenging enough. The complication is that leaves have color, texture and form, which can clash with and upstage the artwork. Scale is also important: Pieces that seem enormous indoors can be dwarfed by nature. Nancy Goslee Power, a Santa Monica, California, designer says her goal at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena was to create a “very calm environment, a place of peace” at the museum’s sculpture garden. Her solution was a sequence of individual settings in a serpentine path that hugs the contours of a meandering pond. The design allows for the appreciation of individual artworks but also holds together as a subtle, cohesive narrative.