Nashville is officially landing one of its most ambitious cultural builds to date after the Andrew Jackson Foundation unveiled a $132 million plan for The Hermitage.
Situated at Andrew Jackson's estate east of downtown Nashville, Perkins&Will released renderings of its new centerpiece: a 70,000-square-foot visitor and education center that will sit mostly below grade, so it never breaks the view across the historic grounds, with a footprint roughly the size of a football field and a half.
The new center replaces the visitor center that opened in 1989 at the third most visited presidential home in the United States. The property draws more than 170,000 people a year.
Perkins&Will calls the concept "Held by the Land." The building will follow the property's natural contours, with much of its footprint tucked beneath the surface to preserve sightlines across the landscape. Going down costs more per square foot than building up. In return, it buys back an uninterrupted view across roughly 1,100 acres.
Inside, the foundation's collection runs to roughly 800,000 objects, and only a fraction of it can be currently displayed today. Gallagher & Associates, designing the museum and interpretive experience, had the building designed around the exhibits rather than the exhibits fitted into the building.
It now joins a run of cultural buildings across Tennessee that is on record. TPAC, a new cultural landmark, has also been recently unveiled for Nashville's East Bank, and across the state the 122,000-square-foot Memphis Art Museum is on pace to open in 2026.
The first phase is already funded. The state's $6 million will pay for an outdoor amphitheater and a climate-controlled visitor comfort facility, both of which come before the visitor center itself. The foundation expects four to five years of fundraising and construction in total, and the site will stay open to visitors through most of it.