Xylem

Xylem is named for the vascular tissue in plants that conducts water and dissolved nutrients upward from the roots.

Francis inspects Xylem's canopy.

Xylem is nestled in a grove of cottonwood and aspen trees, on the bank of Grove Creek at the edge of the art center's main campus.

The seating elements’ organic shapes are inspired in part by abstract paintings that artist and Tippet Rise co-founder Cathy Halstead created based on forms of microscopic life.

"At Tippet Rise, we want the buildings to have the material and formal integrity of sculptures and the sculptures to have the scale and presence of architecture, with both kinds of structures rooted deeply in the experience of land and sky."
-Tippet Rise co-founders Peter and Cathy Halstead

Francis and his team gathered with Peter and Cathy Halstead and our extended community of staff and friends to celebrate Xylem's opening, after two years in the imagining and the making, on a beautiful afternoon in mid-July, 2019.

Xylem is the first site-specific commission to be added to the art center’s collection since Tippet Rise opened in 2016.

It also serves as a place for music making. Here, James Austin Smith, Sauenn Thorsteinsdottir, Nathan Schramm, and Jennifer Fraustchi perform.

Scroll around this image for a wider look at the inside of the pavilion.

The pavilion is an evolution of Kéré’s celebrated 2015 canopy structure for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art near Copenhagen and of his 2017 Serpentine Pavilion in London.

Xylem's canopy-like roof of vertical logs filter the sunlight.

Xylem's design is inspired by the traditional togunas of the Dogon culture of Mali: sacred shelters with wooden pillars, carved with ornaments representing the ancestors.

Xylem's canopy, from above.