The Helmut F. Stern Garden at the W.K. Kellogg Eye Center

The Helmut F. Stern Garden at the W.K. Kellogg Eye Center

The Helmut F. Stern Garden With the dedication of the Helmut F. Stern Garden, we honor a longtime friend of the University of Michigan and the W.K. Kellogg Eye Center. It is a fitting reflection of Mr. Stern’s keen interest in art that this garden was designed as a place of beauty and serenity for our patients and their families, with a work of sculpture commissioned for its centerpiece.

Adding another dimension of interest, especially for those with impaired vision, the garden immerses its visitors in a sensory experience, with birdsongs, fragrant flowers, and the sounds of falling water.

The garden also serves as a visual bridge between the two buildings that form the W.K. Kellogg Eye Center.

Glass walls in the new Brehm Tower, also home of the Brehm Center for Diabetes Research, allow lovely views from many levels of the building. From the upper floors, visitors can catch a glimpse of patches of pattern and color as well as figures of children and adults lingering by the fountain as they make their way to and from the Eye Center.

A Vision for the Garden Andrea Kevrick and Shannan Gibb-Randall, Insite Design, Ann Arbor, explain how they designed a garden for visitors to the Eye Center. “The vision for the courtyard was twofold: to create a sensory garden of restful refuge for patients and staff at the facility, and to present a bold foreground for the entry to the internationally renowned Eye Center. We divided the sensory garden and the building entry using diagonal walls that echo the angle of the entry’s canopy, exaggerate the grade change, and provide the opportunity to integrate falling water and the sculpture. Granite walls were placed over the underground basin. We created a plant palette to enhance scent and sound, drawing song birds from the surrounding river valley, and massed the plantings to create large areas of texture visible to those who have compromised sight.�

Art in the Garden: Gathered Sounds Artist Anne Kirby Rubin, Ann Arbor, was commissioned to create a sculpture for the garden’s water feature. The result is Gathered Sounds, a bas relief sculpture with water elements. Ms. Rubin describes the vision for her work.

“I have long had an interest in the shapes of nature—broken shells, lilac roots, galls interrupting the smooth bark—and have used them as primary sources for visual imagery. Walking in the woods, sitting by a brook, even travelling down a suburban street, I have encountered complex, elegant, but imperfect forms that speak of the magic and mystery of nature—of her variety, fragility, and resilience.

Lately, I have been working with visual elements created in response to sounds found in nature. After contemplating photographs of animal marks in the sand, I saw a resemblance to musical notation—its rhythm, its repetition, its variation…. Considering the relationship between the marks in the sand and music led me to explore the imagery that natural sounds evoked in my mind— where each sound evolved into a specific form and the aggregate of these forms yielded a compositional direction.”

Helmut F. Stern A longtime supporter of the mission of the Kellogg Eye Center, Ann Arbor businessman and philanthropist Helmut F. Stern helped lead the expansion campaign from its inception. Chairing the Community Advisory Board that guided the first steps of the effort, he was instrumental in building the support that ushered the project from an idea to reality. Originally from Hannover, Germany, Mr. Stern settled in Ann Arbor in 1942. He served as president of Industrial Tectonics and later as president of Arcanum Corporation.

Mr. Stern generously supported the Eye Center building campaign and has endowed a Career Development Professorship in Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences as well as the Alexander Gotz, M.D., Endowed Education Fund in Ophthalmology, which recognizes his late physician and friend. Mr. Stern is a trusted advisor and friend throughout the University of Michigan. He is a major benefactor of the U-M Museum of Art and the Medical School. He has also endowed professorships in Chinese Studies and Humanities and has created scholarships for the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, Rackham Graduate School, the School of Engineering, and the School of Public Policy.

Dedicated to Discovery The expansion of the W.K. Kellogg Eye Center allows us to bring advanced eye care to many more patients, some nearby and others who travel great distances to see our ophthalmologists.

These physicians provide the newest treatments and surgical options with a heartfelt dedication to improving our patients’ vision and their quality of life.

With new laboratory space, Kellogg’s vision research program has expanded as well. We have recruited a team of clinicians and researchers whose work centers on the eye complications of diabetes. Other scientists will join our own distinguished teams of scientists.

Together they will be able to pursue many more paths to treatment for diseases like macular degeneration, retinal dystrophies, and glaucoma.

Our new building has many features to make patient visits as pleasant as possible: light-filled clinics and comfortable and spacious reception areas. With this garden, we have a new spot for patients to gather and reflect and simply enjoy the solace of art and nature.