AKRON, Ohio - The elegant new garden dedicated two weeks ago at the Akron Art Museum is quietly but defiantly out of place.

The one-acre garden, which feels as much like a city park as an appendage to the museum, offers an implicit critique of the drab parking lots and one-way thoroughfares that flank it. It effectively challenges Akron to do better, think bigger.

The museum built the garden as an outdoor accompaniment to its architecturally caffeinated 2007 expansion at 1 S. High St., a composition of zooming, wing-like shapes and fractured planes of glass designed by the Viennese architecture firm of Coop Himmelb(l)au to energize downtown.

Named the Bud and Susie Rogers Garden, the new space replaces a pair of unsightly museum parking lots and offers room to extend the institution's energy outdoors. It also provides excellent vantages to view the south side of the Coop Himmelb(l)au expansion.

More than a garden

But it's also much more than an attractive outdoor amenity attached to a cultural institution. It's an important new addition to downtown Akron's meager public realm, in which Lock 3 Park along the Towpath Trail has been the principal green space.

Designed by the Philadelphia-based landscape firm of Olin, which also designed the new David H. Koch Plaza at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the redesign of the Eastman Reading Garden at the Cleveland Public Library, the Akron Art Museum garden is a soft-spoken manifesto that argues in favor of a more hospitable, walkable, pedestrian-oriented downtown.

It encourages one to imagine how the city-owned parking lots located south and east of it could be filled one day with apartments and shops and restaurants at sidewalk level, where cafe seating could spill outside in good weather.

It spurs one to think about how South High Street and Broadway, which flank it to the east and west, could be narrowed and turned into two-way streets with bike lanes and wider sidewalks and better landscaping, so that downtown Akron becomes more of a place instead of a place to zoom through.

If that sounds impossible in a city that has largely missed out on the downtown residential boom benefiting Cleveland and peer cities like it across the country, the new garden offers an alternative vision, and a place to begin.

It seems to say: a better downtown starts here.

Cutting a block down to size

Olin designed the park explicitly as a mid-block shortcut between Broadway and South High Street to encourage walking to and from the museum and other nearby destinations including the Akron-Summit County Public Library.

Experts in walkability say that walkable downtowns ideally should have small blocks measuring 200 to 400 or 500 feet in length to create a more human-scaled environment.

The blocks of South High and Broadway that flank the Akron Art Museum are nearly 1,000 feet long. The museum's new garden effectively cuts that distance in half for pedestrians.

As a mid-block connection, the garden comprises a series of interconnected outdoor rooms that descend from Broadway to South High Street along the south side of the museum.

Entering from the Broadway side, visitors first encounter the "Art Oasis," a plaza surfaced with crushed granite, which feels soft underfoot, and which is planted with swamp white oaks and white stellar dogwoods designed to create a shade canopy as they mature.

Grade change

A pathway on the south edge of the "Art Oasis" leads to the "Criss Cross," a zigzag path that descends with several switchbacks down to garden's main event space, which combines a concrete-paved plaza and a rectangular panel of grass edged with a free-standing wall that would be perfect for projecting movies at night.

As simple as it sounds, the garden is packed with gratifying spatial sensations that endow it with richness and complexity.

The view from the plaza at the top of the garden, for example, feels subtly empowering, as any overlook should.

The zigzag path offers invitingly intimate views of flowers planted in the beds that flank it, including varieties of coneflower and native grasses.

The wooden benches at the base of the zigzag, which face the rectangular lawn and the event plaza, are comfortable and pleasing to the touch. They offer pleasing views of the museum, while also being set back far enough from the High Street traffic to feel secluded and tranquil.

Director's guidance

Mark Masuoka, the Akron Art Museum's director, said the garden grew out of two years of planning that included consultation with Akron residents and museum members.

But Masuoka also exercised his convictions. He said he wanted to preserve the flexibility of the garden for artistic programming and outdoor events, so he opted against installing sculptures from the museum's permanent collection.

He also avoided installing a water feature, for the same reason. It would have tied the space down, and undoubtedly it would have added to the cost of construction and maintenance.

Masuoka said the garden will host the museum's Downtown at Dusk concert series, which begins a seven-week run on Thursday evenings today, July 28, from 6:30 to 8:30 with a performance by the Akron band Moustache Yourself.

He also envisions performances and temporary installations by artists including Theaster Gates of Chicago and Mark Mothersbaugh, co-founder of the band Devo, whose "Myopia" retrospective is on view at the museum through Aug. 28.

Although it was used by only a few visiting office workers as an outdoor lunch spot on a recent weekday, it's easy to envision how the garden could become more popular and attract a regular audience of users.

Imagining a better city

It's also easy to imagine how the space could feel something like an amphitheater when concerts are held in the lower plaza and visitors seat themselves on folding chairs as they do on the lawn at Blossom Music Center in Cuyahoga Falls.

And, most important, the garden seems to anticipate the ways in which a more beautiful city might grow up around it.