A Hirshhorn Museum Garden Redesign Looks Forward. Others Look Back.

The vibrant, eye-catching works that fill the sculpture garden at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum make it easy to overlook their environs. An eclectic mix of installations, like casts of sculptures by Auguste Rodin and one of Yoko Ono’s “Wish Trees,” dot the space.

But since March, when the museum announced plans to redesign it to accommodate a wider variety of programming, the garden has become the subject of intense interest among aficionados of landscape architecture and Washington history.

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Charles Birnbaum, the founder and president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, said, “I think it’s the most significant extant work that he did in Washington.”