Louisville?s Speed Outdoors sets contemporary art amid a new Reed Hilderbrand landscape. 
By Mark R. Long 
The planned outdoor space sits near the intersection of three major greenways.
Image courtesy Reed Hilderbrand.
The Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, is employing landscape architecture and urban planning to broaden its audience and help fill a gap in green space for its urban neighbors, transforming its grounds into an always-open art park that will display more than a dozen sculptures by the likes of Zaha Hadid, Sol LeWitt, and Deborah Butterfield. Scheduled to open in late 2025, the Reed Hilderbrand?designed green space will feature furniture and spaces for people to walk, relax, dine, study, and enjoy cultural programs amid expanses of new plantings, shaded by 150 new native trees. Showcasing 13 contemporary sculptures is a means for the $22 million Speed Outdoors project to draw people from all walks of life into the space, free of charge, says Raphaela Platow, the director of the Speed, Kentucky?s biggest and oldest art institution. ?I felt really strongly that if we embark on a big landscaping project, that we have to build a park for the community and for our adjacent neighborhoods,? she says.
Despite its large, celebrated system of parks and parkways designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and his firm in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many Louisvillians?especially those with lower incomes?are short on green space. A recent equity analysis from th...