Herzog & de Meuron Reveals 400-Foot Great Hall for Eames Museum

A 400-foot-long Great Hall will anchor the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity in Novato, California — a space the design team says will be "one of the largest single-span spaces for art installations in the country".

Herzog & de Meuron and EHDD have released updated master plan designs for the museum, which will adapt a 1960s industrial campus into galleries, workshops and public grounds. Field Operations joins the project as landscape designer, adding its name to a team first announced in July 2025.

What does the new design include?

The program packs a lot into the adapted buildings:

• A 275-seat theatre
• Galleries and maker spaces inside the former warehouse
• A cafe and a wood-clad entrance hall with admissions and a museum shop
• A pavilion for events, converted from the former office building
• A Japanese-inspired garden and children's play spaces outside

Visitors will pass a fountain on entry, then take a grand stair to a 120-foot polished stainless-steel bridge that crosses the gallery spaces below. The renders show open-plan interiors with the enormous concrete bevels of the roof left exposed.

The material palette sticks to colour-stained plywood, plaster and aluminium windows — choices the team says will "create a dialogue between old and new". Wood and ceramic workshops will sit throughout the building.

Why a publishing warehouse from 1965?

The Eames Institute bought the 88.5-acre property in 2025 to create a public exhibition space for its collection of furniture and objects designed by Charles and Ray Eames. For scale, that's roughly 66 American football fields of land.

The site's sawtooth-roofed warehouse and office building were designed by architects Jan Lubicz-Nycz and John Savage Bolles for the McGraw-Hill publishing company, completed in 1965. Birkenstock USA then operated there until 2019.

"What makes this place so extraordinary is the relationship between its remarkable architecture and the landscape of Marin County," said Field Operations partner Richard Kennedy.

"We imagined the grounds as a living extension of the museum. The idea is simple: ten landscapes, hundreds of places, and infinite journeys," Kennedy continued.

How will the landscape change?

Field Operations drew on an original plan by landscape architect Tito Patri, which used berms to bury the buildings into their surroundings and buffer them from the highway running directly in front of the site.

The new scheme reconfigures parking and the arrival sequence, adds gardens to the north and south of the warehouse, plants native stormwater gardens and includes custom furniture designed by the studio. The team says the masterplan will "transform what was once a private, truck-oriented industrial campus into a public cultural destination".

Who is behind it — and when does it open?

"For my grandparents, design was always grounded in curiosity and intention – looking closely, asking questions, embracing constraints, and finding beauty in the practical and the functional," said Eames Institute co-founder Llisa Demetrios, Charles and Ray Eames's granddaughter.

"The museum carries that spirit forward, and it feels especially meaningful to do so in a building that asked us to do the same: work within a remarkable existing structure to imagine what else it can become," she continued.

Groundbreaking is expected in 2028, with openings projected to begin in 2030.

The project has drawn criticism for its backing by Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, who was appointed America's first Chief Design Officer in 2025 under President Donald Trump. The Eames Institute itself was founded in 2023 and opened a California headquarters in 2024, with a brand identity by San Francisco agency Manual.