The Washington Crossing Visitor Center and Museum is a 12,000 SF point of orientation and exhibit gallery at the historic site of General George Washington’s 1776 dramatic Christmas Day crossing of the Delaware River that turned the tide of the American Revolution. The State of New Jersey desired to place a new museum close to the Delaware River where the site of the crossing, its most powerful artifact, would be visible to visitors. Setting the museum in an historic and ecologically sensitive site near the river required a sensitive solution to minimize its mass and presence in the delicate historic landscape. Inspired by the gently sloping topography along the river’s edge, the concept is a biophilic response that integrates the museum’s structure with landforms, green roofs, and sloping pathways thereby obscuring the modern facility within the landscape and it to comfortably co-exist with the adjacent Revolutionary-era agrarian buildings that surround it.

Made of cast in place concrete with exposed regional Delaware Valley stone aggregate, the curving exterior walls of the museum follow and retain the curvature of the slope that it is built into. A sloping vegetative roof planted with native pollinators and meadow grasses seasonally blends the building with adjacent fields that remain much the same as they did 250 years ago. A curving pedestrian pathway that leads to the river’s edge starts at parking and gently ascends onto the building’s vegetative roof, culminating in panoramic views of the Delaware River and continuing down to the river’s edge.  

Internally, an orientation theater and exhibition hall present interactive displays and 18th century artifacts from the events of the crossing and following ten crucial days of the American Revolution. An outdoor amphitheater creates an exterior classroom for tour groups and school trips. This all-electric non-fossil fueled facility incorporates sustainable features into the architectural expression including vegetative roofs to mitigate storm water, high performance building envelope to reduce heating and cooling loads, natural daylighting, and regionally sourced resilient materials of concrete and stone.