The Washington Crossing Visitor Center and Museum is a 12,000 SF point of orientation and museum at the historic site of General George Washington and the Continental Army’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 rivers edge, the concept is a biophilic response that integrates the museum’s structure with landforms, green roofs and sloping pathways thereby obscuring the built structure within the landscape and allowing the modern facility to comfortably co-exist with the adjacent 18th century 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 minimizing its presence and complementing the pre-revolutionary stone buildings that surround the site. 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 and culminates in panoramic views of the Delaware River and continues down to the river’s edge.

Internally, an orientation theater and exhibition hall present interactive displays and 18th century artifacts of the events of the crossing and following ten crucial days of the American Revolution.