Since 1975, the Norton Simon Museum has anchored a stretch of Pasadena’s Colorado Boulevard as a defining cultural institution in Southern California. Its sculpture garden — designed by Nancy Goslee Power and modeled after the gardens at Giverny — has long shaped how visitors experience the museum, offering a quiet, green threshold before stepping inside.

In connection with the museum’s 50th anniversary, SWA worked alongside Architectural Resources Group on a renovation that reconsiders how visitors approach, enter, and move through the campus. Focusing on the museum’s perimeter landscape and arrival sequence, the team resurfaced and realigned sculpture garden paths, enhanced and replaced planting, added new perimeter fencing and gates, updated entrance grading and paving, and improved ADA-compliant routes throughout. The design also limits the impact of extreme heat; large canopy shade trees create obstacles to surface warming over hardscape and streets, while permeable paving absorbs rainfall in areas of regular precipitation.

The result preserves Power’s original structure and intent while improving circulation and accessibility—strengthening the landscape as both a threshold and an extension of the museum experience itself.