Nasher Sculpture Center
Dallas
Renzo Piano Building Workshop

Renzo Piano creates an oasis in downtown Dallas, the Nasher Sculpture Center, a building of lapidary precision in a lush garden

© Timothy Hursley

For more photos click on 'photos & drawings' above. To see the people and products behind this project click on 'people & products.'

By David Dillon

The recently completed Nasher Center covers 2.4 acres in the heart of Dallas's Arts District, across the street from Edward Larrabee Barnes's Museum of Art and a block from I.M. Pei's Meyerson Symphony Center. Within its rough travertine walls resides one of the world's great private collections of Modern sculpture—more than 350 pieces ranging from a small plaster model of Rodin's The Age of Bronze to monumental steel works by Richard Serra and Mark di Suvero. The collection, valued conservatively at $500 million, was stalked by a dozen major museums, including the National Gallery of Art, Guggenheim, and Tate, until Raymond Nasher decided to keep it in the city where he'd made his fortune as a shopping center developer—and foot the project's $70 million bill himself.

He says he chose Renzo Piano for the architect's understanding of art, as well as materials and construction. Right on all counts. The center synthesizes art, architecture, and engineering, replacing bold form with the subtler pleasures of light, texture, and proportion. A building of lapidary precision, it represents Piano at his most self-effacing and exacting. Every minute detail, from arcing vaults to stone joints, has been thought through. Only the large gallery windows seem conventional, more akin to a fancy department store than a museum.

The Nasher Center is an essay in what Italians call sprezzatura, the art that conceals art. Ducts, cables, and sophisticated electronic gear lie crammed within its thin travertine walls, but nothing shows. The aluminum sunscreens are technical tours de force with the simplicity of egg cartons. The granite benches in the garden conceal pumps and electrical boxes; even the loading dock is tucked out of sight, as if trash collection were a purely hypothetical activity.

The plan of the building, a 55,000-square-foot pavilion, is simplicity itself: five vaulted bays, three housing art and one each for a restaurant and museum shop. The lower level contains a library and additional galleries, as well as an auditorium opening onto the garden. On the exterior, the travertine looks weathered and mottled, as if it had just come from the quarry, while on the interior, its polished, mitered surfaces, reminiscent of fine cabinetry, quietly complement the art. White oak floors, creamy travertine, silvery aluminum, and "extra-white" glass form the entire palette: No bright colors, sharp contrasts, or, conversely, bland uniformity.

Light is the Nasher's soul, and the aluminum sunscreens designed with Arup, its technological high point. The client challenged his architects to come up with new ways of bringing daylight into the galleries without resorting to the massive concrete louvers that Piano had used at the Menil Collection or the intricately layered sunscreens of his Cy Twombly Gallery, both in Houston, and his Beyeler Foundation in Basel, Switzerland. At the Nasher, cast-aluminum sunscreens cut into 4-foot-by-6-inch lengths with roughly 500,000 oval scoops rest on a curved glass roof. Oriented due north, the scoops eliminate direct rays and harsh shadows. From one direction, all you see is sky; from another, a finely textured metal surface. Steel cables of nautical delicacy suspend the bowed glazing overhead. Design and fabrication took three years and were clearly worth it.

From the beginning, Mr. Nasher insisted the landscape was as important as the building. He got what he wanted. As refined as the pavilion, the 1.5-acre garden by landscape architect Peter Walker extends its thin travertine walls amid soldierly rows of native live oaks and cedar elms, terminating in James Turrell's Tending Blue light installation (housed in a structure by Interloop A/D). Oaks at the lawn's center will gradually create canopies over the walkways. Deciduous cedar elms will eventually soar to 60 or 70 feet, screening the garden edges while letting in low winter rays.

A gently sloping path leads from the terrace, through an enfilade of trees, to pools and fountains at the foot of the garden. As in the galleries, the color range here is extremely limited: Nothing grand or showy to compete with the sculpture. The long vistas from the pavilion are straight and unobstructed, but the side-to-side views become mysterious and surprising. Here, trees and hedges partially obscure the artworks—sometimes you see, say, only the top of a Di Suvero or a corner of a Lichtenstein. Yet unlike such recent sculpture gardens as the National Gallery's in D.C., the Nasher is not jam-packed like a supermarket. Its architects left plenty of room to pause and reflect.

The Nasher Sculpture Center has raised hopes of finally landing Dallas on the international cultural map. Gehry's Guggenheim did it for Bilbao, and Louis Kahn's great Kimbell Art Museum more modestly transformed Fort Worth (Dallas's neighbor). It's always a long shot. In the meantime, the locals, many of whom had given up on finding anything exciting downtown, are flocking to the Nasher.

See the January 2004 issue of Architectural Record for full article.

Location:
Dallas

Gross square footage:
60,000 sq.ft. (Building), 2.44 acres (Building and Garden)

Total construction cost:
$70 million

Owner:
The Nasher Foundation

Architect:
Renzo Piano Building Workshop
via P.P. Rubens, 29 - 16158 Genoa
011 39 010 617 1350 (fax)
011 39 010 617 11 (phone)
www.rpbw.com