The Contemporary Austin is wasting no time in getting its 12-acre lakeside estate ready for the future Betty and Edward Marcus Sculpture Park at Laguna Gloria, for which it was awarded $9 million by the Marcus Foundation in September. The Contemporary organized a committee, led by UT’s Dean of Architecture, that sent out a Request for Qualifications back in May; it has now announced three landscape architecture firms as finalists to create a Master Site Plan. After reconvening next month, the committee is expected to make a final official announcement in early spring.
The three finalists are: Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture (San Francisco, CA); Reed Hilderbrand Landscape Architecture (Boston, MA); and SNØHETTA (New York, NY, and Oslo, Norway). Most of the projects of the first firm have been on the West Coast, including the sculpture mall at the Portland Art Museum; Reed Hilderbrand recently completed a landscape renovation at the Dallas Museum of Art; and SNØHETTA is working on a Houston transit station to be completed in 2017.
