The Field Museum of Natural History is a cultural touchstone in Chicago and one of the largest natural history museums in the world. Working closely with the museum staff, site completed a Landscape Masterplan that extends the mission of the museum to the outdoors and expands the scope of their exhibits and programs by fostering growing community awareness of ecological processes, sustainable practices, and landscape restoration.
The Masterplan envisions a site that participates in larger environmental systems and landscape patterns within the Museum Campus, a network that has the potential to improve the overall ecological health of the city of Chicago’s lakefront and catalyze additional sustainable landscape design and management at the regional level.
The Masterplan divided the site into a series of eight constituent landscapes – the Field Museum site proper, referred to as the Field Museum Terrace and comprising four separate terraces, and four adjacent projects which are partially or wholly owned by the Chicago Park District. Each component was designed to contribute to a coherent whole, however, the unique programmatic requirements of each landscape and issues concerning ownership required that the vision be executed in phases rather than at once. To date, each of the Field Museum's Terraces has been implemented, and are together referred to as the Rice Native Gardens.
