BEACON, NY

Dia : Beacon

water is memory

A river crossing, a brickyard, a factory, a museum. The 32-acre site that today hosts Dia Art Foundation’s upstate New York home is endowed with the spatial legacy of each of its prior iterations. History’s impressions on the land have inspired Studio Zewde’s design for the next era of Dia’s landscape, and, now, are marshaled to the task of managing its 21st-century fate: rising water. The moment necessitates new, and old, ways of thinking – about time, water, materiality, and the agency of the land itself. At Dia Beacon, it also calls for a new mode of human access and engagement with the site. In 2021, Studio Zewde began working with the Dia Art Foundation, Sherwood Design Engineers, Larry Weaner Landscape Associates, and Pine & Swallow Environmental to craft a landscape that honors the past as it braces for the future.

The landscape design is structured as a series of sculptural landforms moving east-to-west, retracing indigenous movements through the landscape towards the river and reorienting a site which, for the last century, has been rigorously organized North-South along the industrial-era railroad. With this shift, the design recalls the history of the site as a part of the river’s floodplain, allowing water into the landscape between the repeated landforms. This reorientation is informed by the past, yet ultimately looks to the future and the inevitable return of water; the earthworks function as a bulwark against the rising Hudson, and bolstering resilience to a 500-year design storm.