Image: Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art, Staten Island
The Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art in Staten Island has scheduled an ‘An Architecture & Landscape Walking Tour’ for July 11, offering visitors a guided look at the museum’s fieldstone halls and terraced gardens. The event is listed as a 45-minute tour and is priced at $20, with admission $15 for members. A museum event page also identifies the tour as part of the site’s recurring calendar of programs.
The museum describes its campus as the first Himalayan-style architecture built in America, and its own website presents the hilltop property as a distinctive architectural ensemble designed to evoke a Tibetan Buddhist mountain monastery, particularly the Potala at Lhasa. The institution says the buildings were designed by its founder and that the site includes terraced gardens overlooking Raritan Bay. Those details frame the walking tour as an on-site exploration of the museum’s architecture and landscape rather than a conventional gallery visit.
According to the tour listing, the route follows the hillside path that Jacques Marchais and stonemason Joseph Primiano once used while gathering fieldstone across Staten Island for the walls that became the museum. The description singles out trapezoidal windows, slate-capped doorways, and a pagoda roof copied from a Lama Temple replica built for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. The same text says none of these elements existed on the hill before Marchais and her husband, Harry Klauber, bought the property in 1921.
The tour also places the campus in the timeline of the museum’s development. It notes that the Library was completed in 1945 and is home to nearly two thousand volumes of Tibetan art and literature, while the museum campus itself opened to the public on October 5, 1947. The site was modeled on a chanting hall Marchais studied through photographs and research, according to the listing.
Outside, the Samadhi Garden extends across terraces built over the early decades of the 1900s. The museum’s description highlights stone stairways, a fish and lotus pond set into the hillside below the museum, and niche-like seating carved from retaining walls. Visitors on the tour will also see trapezoidal door and window frames intended to echo traditional Tibetan architecture and uncoursed fieldstone masonry used without quarried block.
The museum notes that photography is permitted throughout the tour, while video recording is not. It also says the museum reserves the right to photograph attendees for promotional use, and that event fees are non-refundable and tickets are transferable. Museum admission is included in the price.
The tour is one of several summer programs listed on the museum’s calendar, but its published description focuses squarely on the architecture and landscape of the campus itself. The event is scheduled for July 11, 2026, from 11:45 AM to 12:45 PM at 338 Lighthouse Avenue in Staten Island.
