The landscape at Wesleyan’s Integrative Arts Lab directly supports the building’s program, extending the experience into exterior spaces that are intentionally flexible and highly adaptable, appropriately scaled and detailed for open-ended experimentation in teaching, learning, making and performing. These spaces are at the same time purposely composed to connect the building and its users to the immediate context, a predominately residential neighborhood with a clear historical fabric and a variety of building types, but with a consistency of similarly sized front yards and a legible, intact streetscape of trees and sidewalks. Connecting these groups—the University community with its neighbors—in a highly functional and energetic space is the singular goal of the landscape design.

The big landscape move is the large, two-sided landform at the corner of Hamlin and College. This figure holds the corner of the site and creates both an outer, welcoming lawn space for neighbors to engage and creates an inner space more conducive to student activities—a central space for performing, creating, making, and hanging out. An undifferentiated field of paving stitches together the entire site and ‘carpet’ panels of a second paving type connect interior and exterior program together. The field of paving also frames the simple, distinctive form of the historic building’s endwall, maintaining the legibility of the historical artifact by allowing the purity of its form to be read without interruption from rooftop to ground plane.