Editor’s note: This is the seventh installment in a series of essays by architecture critic Mark Lamster that tells the history of Dallas through the buildings that define the city.
How to pick a favorite building from the Arts District? The Dallas Museum of Art is the first of its signature buildings and remains the linchpin; the Meyerson Symphony Center is the most flamboyant; the Wyly Theatre the most architecturally inventive. And then there is the Nasher Sculpture Center.
The smallest of the district’s venues, at least in square footage, it is unquestionably the most refined, a work of supreme aesthetic and technical sophistication. It wears its classical heritage proudly yet is self-evidently a work of modernism.
Above all, the Nasher models Dallas as its best self. In a city that favors the grandiose, it is demure, less an object that demands veneration than a stage for the art it showcases and, of equal importance, for the performance of a genteel urban sophistication. To stand on its generous terrace is to experience a unique kind of enchantment, to be within the city but also apart from it. Every major city has a museum, a symphony, a theater. Only Dallas has the Nasher.
It was almost not to be.
In early 1997, when Ray Nasher was considering where to make a home for the extraordinary sculpture collection he had assembled with his late wife, Patsy, Dallas was one of several candidates. The Tate, in London, was interested. So was Washington’s National Gallery of Art, whose director, J. Carter Brown, promised Nasher a site on the National Mall. Thomas Krens, the expansionist director of New York’s Guggenheim, wanted it as well, and proved it with a major exhibition at the museum. “Raymond Nasher has taken on Frank Lloyd Wright in New York — and won,” David Dillon wrote in a review of the show for The Dallas Morning News.
Being wooed
In April 1997, the Dallas City Council approved an offer to Nasher to keep the collection in Dallas. The timing was not coincidental. It did not help the city’s cause that the Dallas Museum of Art would presumably take responsibility for the collection. A longtime member of the museum’s board, Nasher was skeptical of its leadership and its ability to manage the collection. The developer of NorthPark Center — just one of his real estate successes — was adamant about getting what he wanted. “Nasher liked the feeling of being wooed,” wrote Robert A. Wilson in a 2004 book on the Nashers.
Dallas could not compete with London, New York and Washington in prestige, but it was home. Ray and Patsy Nasher had moved here in 1950 from Boston, his hometown. There he had attended the elite Boston Latin School before receiving his undergraduate degree from Duke and a master’s degree in economics from Boston University. Patsy was a Dallas native, a graduate (at the age of 14) of Highland Park High School, after which she attended The Hockaday School, Southern Methodist University and Smith College. The couple met in Boston at an election night party in 1948.
The Nashers began collecting sculpture in the early 1960s, around the time they moved into a modern house in Preston Hollow designed by architect Howard Meyer. The wooded site seemed a good setting for art, and soon both house and garden were filled with works by the likes of Brâncuși, Giacometti and Rodin. Moonbird, an anthropomorphic bronze by the Spanish sculptor Joan Miró, was a favorite of Andrea Nasher, the eldest of the couple’s three daughters. “When I needed a cuddle or to kind of hide or something like that, I’d go and I’d sit in the left arm of it because nobody could see me,” she recalled. “It was my friend.”
By art market standards, large outdoor pieces like Moonbird were affordable; the space required to display them depressed their value. “We were fortunate in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s that sculpture was considered a secondary or a tertiary kind of art form from a pricing point of view,” Nasher told National Public Radio in 2003. But the Nashers did not buy art as a financial investment. “Patsy and I purchased all of these because they gave us butterflies, they made us feel as if they were very important.”
‘They don’t build statues to those who create shopping malls’
As the collection grew, the Nashers began displaying it at NorthPark, the mall they opened in 1965. (Sculpture was not, as is commonly assumed, part of the mall’s original plan.) By the time Patsy died of cancer in 1988, the couple had assembled one of the world’s leading private collections of modern sculpture. Where it would end up became a matter of international speculation.
Dallas business, political and arts leaders worked to put together an offer that would persuade Nasher to keep the collection in the city, assembling a 2.4-acre site along Harwood Street across from the DMA and budgeting $15.6 million in public money for the project. The DMA would be responsible for additional costs and would acquire the collection for its own.
Ron Kirk, then the city’s mayor, appealed to Nasher’s ego and emotional connection to his adopted hometown, telling him, “they don’t build statues to those who create shopping malls.” As Kirk knew, Nasher had wanted the family name on I.M. Pei’s symphony hall, but was reluctant to meet the $10 million asking price and lost the chance when Ross Perot paid to have it named for his longtime associate, Morton Meyerson.
On April 8, 1997, Nasher’s decision was announced on the front page of The News. The collection would stay in Dallas but would remain under family control and not be given to the DMA. A private foundation, created for the purpose and funded by Nasher, would build and operate the Nasher Sculpture Garden, as it was then to be called, and would absorb the entire cost of the project, then pegged at $32 million. “If somebody in Paris, France, is thinking about where a great sculpture garden might be,” said Nasher, “we want them to come to Dallas.”
‘An office park with an arts theme’
That was good news for the city, and better news for the languishing Arts District, which was hardly living up to its name, or the grand ambitions of its conception. That idea was the product of a 1977 report by the planners Stephen Carr and Kevin Lynch. In the early 1980s, the report was converted into a formal plan by Boston-based Sasaki Associates that established Flora Street as the spine of a mixed-use neighborhood dedicated to the arts.
In theory, the centrally located, newly built facilities would be a much needed boost for downtown, not to mention a more convenient drive for the North Dallas patron class. The relocations, however, meant pulling cultural institutions out of Black-majority South Dallas. Adding insult to injury, the area selected for this development — at the time a patchwork of industrial uses, surface parking lots and car dealerships — had previously been part of a freedman’s town founded by formerly enslaved people after the Civil War.
Progress on the district was slow. In 1985, Dillon, architecture critic of The News, lamented that it was “more of an office park with an arts theme than a cultural district.” Excepting the opening of the Meyerson Symphony Center in 1989, there had been little to change that impression until Nasher’s decision to bring his collection there.
When that decision was made public, the idea was that it would be an outdoor venue, with 66 large-scale works shown on a rotating basis. But it was not long before Nasher decided there should be a pavilion for the display of smaller, indoor works with space for rotating exhibitions, administration, storage and a cafe.
The man he selected to realize it was Renzo Piano, a gentlemanly Italian architect then developing a reputation as a designer of museum spaces of impeccable refinement and technological sophistication. Born into a family of Genovese builders in 1937, he studied architecture in Florence and Milan, worked in the family construction business, and then apprenticed in the Philadelphia office of Louis Kahn, an architect esteemed for his ethereal structures.
‘A true neer-do-well’
It was a friendship with the Swiss art dealer Ernst Beyeler that prompted Nasher to place Piano at the top of his list. As Nasher was expanding the scope of his project, Piano was completing a museum outside Basel to house Beyeler’s extensive collection of modern art. Set in a bucolic landscape, that building was an exercise in discipline and restraint, with rectilinear concrete walls and a roof of layered glass panels that bathed the interior in diffuse light.
Nasher was already well acquainted with Piano’s Menil Collection in Houston, which had opened a decade earlier, in 1987. Like the Beyeler, it is a work of apparent modesty, mirroring the residential scale and character of the surrounding Montrose neighborhood. Inside, soft light filters down through a roof system of ferro-cement “leaves” set within a steel grid.
Piano’s work was not always so deferential. He emerged as a young architectural star when he and his then-partner Richard Rogers won the 1971 competition for the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The two upstarts had proposed a radical inversion of a standard museum building, pushing its structure and mechanical innards — pipes, ducts, tubes for circulation — onto its exterior to leave broad, unobstructed spaces within.
When completed, in 1977, it looked like nothing else, as much a machine as a museum, an aesthetic shock dropped into the heart of traditional Paris, much as the Eiffel Tower had been a century earlier. It was an immediate sensation, though not everyone approved. Rogers liked to recount the story of a visit to the building’s plaza during a rainstorm shortly after its opening. An elderly woman approached him and asked if he knew who had designed it. When Rogers said he was the architect, she whacked him over the head with her umbrella.
By the time Piano began working with Nasher, he was no longer a radical. In 1981, he had established the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, the firm’s name testifying to an emphasis on teamwork and craft. By the 1990s, the restrained work exemplified by the Menil and the Beyeler was out of step with architectural fashion, which was hewing to the extravagant forms of Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind. Indeed, Gehry’s instantly iconic Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, opened on the same day as Piano’s Beyeler Foundation, placing the latter into near total eclipse.
In a letter to Nasher, Piano reflected on his position within the profession: “For decades I was sort of an outcast, blacklisted from the clubs, the schools, the academies. As a true neer-do-well, this excommunication has always been a source of satisfaction.”
Nasher, similarly, had no interest in the kind of signature building that was coming to define the museum architecture of the late 1990s. “A lot of architects have a style of their own and try to impose it on every project. That’s not the way to get excellence,” he told The News. “I want an architect who will take the program I write and make it work the way I see it in my mind.”
‘A noble ruin’
Piano was never going to be a mere conduit for Nasher’s ideas, but the two did share a vision for a design that would appear timeless and archaic, in Nasher’s words, “a noble ruin.” Piano found that inspiration in Herdonia, a Roman archaeological site in southern Italy. He translated its partially excavated walls into the “ribs of stone” that give structure to a pavilion of five parallel bays, each 24 feet wide. In the galleries, those Italian travertine walls are polished, but on the exteriors (and in the walls that enclose the garden) they are artificially corroded to give the archaic appearance both architect and client wanted.
The gallery walls act as a kind of sandwich, with the building’s mechanical systems hidden in a slot between two layers of travertine — an inversion of the exposed systems at the Pompidou. Downstairs, there’s a gallery for light-sensitive works, administrative offices and an auditorium that looks out on a stepped amphitheater that descends from the garden outside.
The problem was where the pavilion should go on the 2.4-acre Nasher site. Piano’s practice was to find the “genius loci” of a space and take that as inspiration, but there was not a lot of “genius” to be found in an asphalt lot on a block with little pedestrian traffic next to a depressed highway. On early visits to the site, both Piano and project manager Emanuela Baglietto were repeatedly stopped by police for walking in the area. “They wanted to know what I was doing on the street by myself,” Piano recalled.
Piano’s first impulse was to place the pavilion on the northwestern edge of the site, fronting Woodall Rodgers Freeway. That idea was rejected not by Ray Nasher but by his daughter Andrea, who had thrust herself into the design process and would do much to shape its outcome — often to the great irritation of her father. “I loved my dad, but I also loved what we were creating, and I wanted it to be as good as it could be,” she said in a recent interview. “I couldn’t not speak out even when people were angry with me, which was a lot.”
She didn’t like the idea of entering from the northwest because it would have presented visitors with a distracting view of the looming, 50-story Crow Center across Flora Street and the Dallas skyline beyond it. (Piano described the relationship with the Crow tower as “David vs. Goliath.”) Piano then proposed moving the pavilion along Harwood Street; this Andrea also rejected, as it would have dramatically narrowed the space for the landscaped garden.
Eventually the team landed on a location facing Flora Street. Andrea Nasher, however, wasn’t done. The pavilion’s defining characteristic is the gentle northern light that illuminates the galleries from above. But that was not how Piano had first conceived of the building; the preliminary design called for a flat, solid roof. At a meeting at Piano’s Genoa office, Andrea pushed for natural light to come from above, as at the Beyeler and the Menil. “I stood up and I just said, this is sculpture, we don’t have to worry about light damage,” she recalled.
The concept came quickly, but the design took considerable time and work in collaboration with the London-based structural engineering firm Arup. The patented result sets a grid of die-cast aluminum tubes or “oculi” above glass vaults held aloft by steel beams. The oculi — there are 223,030 of them — are individually shaped and oriented to capture the northern light prized by artists and curators.
Originally, the oculi were intended to be made of fiberglass, a plan that proved ineffective when tested in a yard outside Piano’s Genoa office. “It was summer and somehow the fiberglass didn’t resist the sun,” says Baglietto. “It was a disaster.” They switched to aluminum, and found an Italian manufacturer of radiators who could make the oculi in parts that could be easily snapped together. To this day, Baglietto keeps a model of the system on her office desk.
‘Obstinated’
Ray Nasher and Renzo Piano had similar personalities; both were detail-oriented, and both liked to have their way. “Ray was a really wonderful person with his own ideas, and you had to explain [to] him with very, very good reason why you wanted to do something different from what he said,” recalls Baglietto. Piano, in his Italian-inflected English, simply called him “obstinated.”
Piano was equally demanding. On site visits, he walked around with a tape measure in his pocket so he could ensure things were up to his exacting standards. When informed that a row of bathroom floor tiles would have to be cut to fit, he suggested the entire wall be moved. (Instead, the cut tiles were laid behind the toilets, where nobody would see.)
One thing Nasher and Piano did not agree on was the design of the garden, or at least who should be responsible for it. Piano wanted the design for himself. But Nasher was not satisfied with what Piano had proposed. “After a year, the building was coming along beautifully, but I didn’t see the landscape I wanted, so I brought in Peter Walker,” Nasher told The News in 2003.
On paper, Walker was an ideal choice. At the beginning of his career, he had been a draughtsman in the office of landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, a key member of Nasher’s NorthPark design team. Later, after studying at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, he joined the office of Hideo Sasaki, whose firm would produce the Arts District plan. More recently, the San Francisco-based Walker had completed a pair of well-received landscape projects in North Texas: Burnett Park in Fort Worth and the Solana campus in Westlake. Both designs evinced a modernist’s penchant for rigorous formality.
Walker’s initial plan for the Nasher garden deviated from those precedents. Inspired by the wooded site of the Nashers’ Dallas home, it was more picturesque in character, with winding paths, amoeba-shaped ponds and artificial mounds intended to create a sense of topographic differentiation. Nobody was satisfied, least of all Piano.
The two designers made for an odd couple. In person, the debonair Piano towered over the more cerebral Walker. When it came to the garden, they had vastly different visions. “It was a duel of the titans,” said Vel Hawes, who served as Nasher’s representative on the project. “They kept filibustering each other over everything, to the point that we tried not to have the two of them in town at the same time.” The relationship recalled that of architect I.M. Pei and acoustician Russell Johnson, who famously squabbled over the design of the Meyerson Symphony Center.
Walker eventually landed on a design that was more aligned with the linear nature of Piano’s building and more easily adapted to a rotating catalog of sculptures of various sizes. It is defined by a 39,000-square-foot central lawn with an allée of live oaks on one side and an orchard-like setting of cedar elms on the other. Two rectangular reflecting pools bisected by a wooden footbridge sit at the far end of the lawn, with a stepped mound along its northwestern edge to provide aural protection from Woodall Rodgers. These spaces are accented by Afghan pine, crape myrtle and weeping willow. Outside the garden walls, magnolias line the street fronts.
“We wanted to create something that was visually unique. But we were also looking for a solution that didn’t upstage the sculpture,” Walker said. He called the finished design “an open, continuous stage.”
‘Call it magic’
The curtain went up on Oct. 20, 2003. That morning, a line stretched out the Nasher’s glazed front doors and around the block: Office workers, mothers with strollers, students from nearby Booker T. Washington High School, retirees and a nun were there to join the city’s cultural and political heavyweights for a look at the Arts District’s newest addition.
They wandered through Piano’s light-filled galleries and strolled Walker’s “outdoor rooms,” navigating dozens of works, among them Richard Serra’s My Curves Are Not Mad, a pair of bending steel plates that create a narrow path, and Andrea Nasher’s beloved Moonbird.
The formalities began with an invocation from David Stern, the rabbi of Temple Emanu-El. “Call it magic, call it spirit, call it art,” he said. “We see our city differently on this day. And so may we see ourselves.” Nasher followed, expressing his hope that the center would inspire a “renaissance in Dallas.” Indeed, a Dallas Morning News editorial timed to the opening compared Nasher to the Medicis, and not just because the price tag of the museum had nearly doubled to $70 million. “There is ample reason to hope that the Nasher Sculpture Center could help Dallas to achieve the critical mass of arts development that the city needs to become a world-class cultural and economic oasis in North Texas,” the editors wrote.
Critics were universally approving of the new museum. The New York Times called it a “smashing combination of indoor museum and outdoor environment.” The Architectural Review, never an easy grader, lauded it as a work of “delicate grace,” and a worthy complement to Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Most effusive was Dallas Morning News critic David Dillon, who celebrated it as “a refined synthesis of art, architecture and engineering in which bold form gives way to the pleasures of light, texture and mood.”
The story of the Nasher might have ended there, happily ever after. Piano’s career has continued on its upward trajectory; from Boston to Los Angeles, Houston to Chicago, Piano’s buildings are a common feature of major American cities. In 2013, his addition to his one-time mentor Kahn’s Kimbell was opened. Walker’s post-Nasher work includes the landscape of the memorial at Ground Zero, in New York, and the campus of the University of Texas at Dallas.
But the coda to the Nasher story has been more difficult. Less than a decade after its opening, the institution that was designed to be timeless was buffeted by a pair of existence-altering events.
The Glare
The first event can be dated to the afternoon of Sept. 26, 2011. It was then that members of the museum staff noticed harsh reflections from the facade of a building under construction next door were shining into the Nasher garden and producing honeycomb patterns on the travertine gallery walls. That building was Museum Tower, a $200 million luxury apartment high-rise.
The story of what would become known as The Glare was soon making national headlines. Its ironies made for journalistic catnip: A tower designed for plutocrats — complete with a private dog run — was compromising one of the institutions its presence and name were intended to exploit. Compounding problems, the building was owned by the city’s cash-strapped Police and Fire Pension Fund, which was soon under FBI investigation for alleged mismanagement and its investments in luxury real estate.
It made for an entertaining story, but in practice it was not funny at all, embroiling the institution intended to enhance the city’s cultural reputation in a fight that only exacerbated a perception of Dallas as a place of nouveau-riche ostentation and philistinism.
The situation remains unresolved and stalemated, with each side, museum and tower, waiting for the other to blink and take responsibility. “They must solve the problem because they created the problem,” Piano told The New York Times in 2012. In the same article, Scott Johnson, the tower’s architect, said: “I can’t say sitting here now that the Nasher may not need to do something on their end.”
Various remedies have been proposed, ranging from the plausible (a non-reflective film on the tower’s windows) to the ridiculous (a 400-foot-tall mechanical structure that would unfold to block the sun’s rays).
More recently, the Piano firm, in collaboration with Arup, has developed a system that would insert elements into the oculi that would deflect incoming rays. But that proposal would reduce the overall illumination in the galleries, and present maintenance challenges. “We’re not there yet,” says Jeremy Strick, who will retire in June after 15 years as the Nasher’s director. “The only solutions that address the entirety of the problem are ones that involve changes to the facade of Museum Tower.”
The second transformative event was the October 2012 opening of Klyde Warren Park, which decked over the trenched Woodall Rodgers Freeway on the Nasher’s northwestern edge. That park has been an enormous and somewhat unexpected success, giving the city a popular front lawn and gathering place. In doing so, it has dramatically shifted the polarity of the Arts District, displacing Flora Street as its center of gravity and pedestrian activity.
Piano’s original inclination to place the entry on the northwest, inappropriate in 1997, would now make sense. Instead, the museum turns its back on the park. And though Piano had conceived of the museum as, in his words, “an oasis, not a citadel,” in practice it is a walled compound.
Breaking down that barrier should be a priority for the museum as it looks to the future, and there is a clear opportunity to do so. A casualty of Museum Tower was a viewing chamber — or “skyspace” — by the artist James Turrell. His Tending (Blue) is a 26-foot black granite cube embedded in the museum’s stepped northwestern wall. With the tower poking into what was intended to be an unobstructed view of the sky, Turrell declared the work “destroyed,” though it remains standing, an inaccessible ghost. Its removal would give the museum a logical new entry facing the park.
“It’s possible that at some point, some kinds of adjustments will be made,” Strick says. “We’ve considered them over the years, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if something isn’t done at one point or another.”
Whatever the future, and despite its challenges, the Nasher remains a work of extraordinary grace, a place that never fails to deliver a sense of urbane pleasure. “Every time I walk in, I just feel a little bit better,” Strick says. “There’s just a rush of joy or pleasure at the very least, being in that space and being bathed in that light and seeing beautiful things. I think it’s pretty extraordinary.”
Few buildings anywhere can justify that kind of praise. Dallas is fortunate to have one of them.
The essays in this series will be collected in a volume to be produced by the nonprofit publishing house Deep Vellum. Read earlier installments on Millermore Mansion, the Adolphus Hotel, NorthPark Center, the Hyatt Regency and Reunion Tower, Fountain Place and City Hall.
