Renzo Piano's beautiful, subtle Dallas gallery makes his London skyscraper look outmoded. By Jonathan Glancey
In St John's gospel, Nathanael says to Philip: "Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?" Philip replies: "Come and see." And off they go to find Jesus and follow him. Dallas, Texas, on the wrong day, and seen on foot, can seem like Philip's Nazareth. Its almighty downtown grid of gas-guzzling, heat-generating skyscrapers devoted to the exploitation of oil is not exactly a vision of the celestial city. In fact, Dallas was dubbed the City of Hate in the 1960s when it was still in the grip of a virulent, Bible-bashing, rightwing political culture: it was from the Texas School Book Depository on Dealey Plaza that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy in 1963.
At the time, the city's most famous architectural monument was the 29-storey Magnolia Building, dating from 1922 and designed by the English-born New York architect Alfred C Bossom for the Magnolia Petroleum Company's ZE Marvin. Marvin was Grand Dragon of the local branch of the Ku Klux Klan, which, at the time, boasted some 13,000 members out of a population of 160,000.
But times have changed. Now, a third of Dallas's population of 1.2 million is black, a third hispanic, a third "non-hispanic white". And, despite President Bush's damaging influence on the image of Texas, liberal-minded folk thrive here and the arts are taken as seriously as big business. Nowhere more so than at the very foot of the city's range of mountainous office towers in the guise of the new Nasher Sculpture Centre, designed by Renzo Piano, engineered by Ove Arup and landscaped by Peter Walker.
Occupying a 2.4-acre city block, the art gallery is a $70m gift to the city from the Nasher Foundation. Raymond Nasher, a local real-estate developer, and his late wife, Patsy, began collecting pre-Colombian sculpture on holidays to Mexico in the 1950s. In 1961, the couple turned to contemporary sculpture with a work by Jean Arp bought by Patsy for Raymond's birthday. Soon after, the Nashers invested in a brace of Henry Moores - Vertebrae and Reclining Figure No 9 - bought from the artist on a visit to England for $100,000. Works by Rodin, Picasso and Calder followed, along with examples by De Kooning, Di Suvero, Giacometti, Hepworth, Kelly, Matisse, Miró and Serra. Today, the Nasher collection stands at some 350 works, with 70 exhibited at a time inside the new Dallas gallery and 25 of the larger works in the gardens.
Sited across the street from the Dallas Museum of Art, the Nasher building, with its lush garden, is a special place. Here is a beautifully simple, unpretentious, practical, likable and well-crafted building, an oasis in a city of mirror-glass towers. It seems a little strange to be showing this building at a time when Piano, undoubtedly one of the world's finest architects, has just witnessed the opening of his immense, eye-catching Padre Pio church in Foggia, southern Italy, and is busy with the design of his first building in Britain, a catwalk-thin 1,000-ft pyramid on the south side of London Bridge - designed, it seems, to prick the face of God. Old Europe gets architectural and religious overkill, while a cultured subtlety emerges in the young Lone Star State.
There is a delightful and knowing touch of very old Europe here in Dallas; the six retaining walls of Piano's five-bay, single-storey gallery are made of travertine, the stone that shaped the imperial architecture of ancient Rome. If you squint at them through the midday sun, these walls might just be the remains of some classical temple roofed over with a pergola of steel and glass, brooding quietly in a grand old garden. This is a lovely conceit.
But, although the limestone walls and garden bed the gallery firmly into the downtown grid of Dallas, as if they had been here for at least as long as the Magnolia Building, the building makes use of innovative glazing techniques and is every inch the model of a modern sculpture centre. It comprises five barrel-vaulted bays, fashioned from light steel and glass and overlaid with a suspended egg-crate aluminium parasol that, very neatly, allows only north light to penetrate the galleries below. The light in the galleries, which occupy two of the five bays, is kept at a more or less constant level, fine for showing most sculpture.
The galleries themselves are handsome affairs with polished stone walls and timber floors. Their proportions are those of a double cube, as you might find in a Renaissance palazzo or Roman basilica, and although it isn't big - certainly not by Dallas standards - the Nasher Centre feels airy and generous.
The three remaining bays comprise the entrance, a shop, offices and a cafe. A basement, much larger than the superstructure, houses a further gallery for delicate objects, additional offices, an auditorium, conservation workshops, a kitchen, mechanical services and so on. These, too, give on to the garden, which occupies by far the greater part of the centre's site.
This arrangement reminded me a little of Mies van der Rohe's National Gallery in Berlin - a building that seems, at first sight, to be far too small to house a major public art collection and, with its great glass windows, wholly inappropriate for its function. It is only when you step downstairs into the bulk of the structure that you realise what you see from the street is no more than a signature pavilion, or a Greek temple in a 1960s minidress, crowning the gallery proper. Piano's sculpture centre makes reference to Rome rather than Athens, yet there is something of the same spirit in its design.
The design is also a homage to the work of the great Louis Kahn (1901-74), whose Kimbell Art Museum, at Forth Worth, Texas (1966-72) comprises 16 barrel-vaulted bays walled with travertine. Piano is also referring here to his own design for the Menil Collection gallery at Houston, Texas (1985-87). Like the Nasher FCentre, the Menil building is low-lying, modest, ingeniously lit from above - with a roof design by the late Peter Rice of Ove Arup - and occupies an entire city block. The difference between the two is that the Menil carries its sculpture collection in an attic storey rather than below as in the Nasher Centre, and the structure is clad in homely grey cypress clapboard rather than imperious travertine. Both buildings are very different indeed from Piano's first art gallery, the flamboyant Pompidou Centre in Paris, designed with Rice and Richard Rogers soon after the demonstrations and riots of 1968, and completed in 1977.
The modesty of patron and architect in Texas is remarkable. It is perhaps curious that in Texas, where private patronage is conducted on the kind of grand scale almost unknown in Britain, that the resulting arts buildings should so often be so very gentle, while in London the talent of an architect like Piano is stretched to outlandish, commercially driven extremes. Which is the more rapacious machine for making money, London or Dallas?
It is not just London. British cities in general have fallen in love with the kind of architectural bombast Dallas knew back in the days when it was the City of Hate. Forty years on, our cities are clamouring for sky-high business towers and indulging in whale-like arts and cultural centres that future generations may well find hard to staff, fund, fill and maintain. Who cares? Let the Texans go their way, and, yee-hah, we will go ours. The gung-ho Renzo Piano we want is a very different one from the civilised Italian commissioned by the Nasher Foundation. Can there any good thing come out of Dallas? Sure: a subtlety we could learn from, and for all our good.
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Nasher Sculpture Center: http://www.nashersculpturecenter.org
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