The Women's Museum
Dallas
Wendy Evans Joseph Architects

A new museum inside a 1909 state fair pavilion respects the past but points to the future

© Wyatt Gallery

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By David Dillon

The Women's Museum: An Institute for the Future is the first comprehensive center for women's studies in the country. Organized by a cadre of A-type Texas women and built almost entirely with private funds, it has a national agenda that belies
its regional roots.

The $11.5 million building occupies a restored 1909 coliseum in Dallas' Fair Park, a National Historic Landmark. From a distance it looks like just another foursquare stucco box, except for a sublimely kitschy statue of Venus emerging from a cactus at the front door.

The interiors are all steel and glass and slashing diagonals, like a turn-of-the-century train shed redesigned for the computer age. It was conceived as a large interactive classroom in which engagement rather than the passive contemplation of exquisite objects is the goal. Visitors passing through the Art Deco lobby, added for the 1936 Texas Centennial, see virtually the entire building at a glance: the historic brick shell with its arched windows and exposed steel trusses; a soaring central space called "The Gathering," punctuated by a 35-foot electronic quilt; the museum shop wrapped in glass and perforated copper screens; and a cantilevered staircase leading to exhibits on the upper floors.

As in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial in Washington, D.C.—for which Ms. Joseph was senior designer during her tenure at Pei Cobb Freed & Partners—visitors start at the top of the building and descend gradually to the bottom, moving from past to present, reflective to interactive installations. At points they can step away from the exhibits onto balconies and bridges to take in the entire building. In some places—the steel suspension bridge at the west end of The Gathering, or the sliding copper screens around the museum shop—the new architecture plays aggressively off the old. In others, it steps back to let history have a voice, as in the restrained wood ceiling and the deferential treatment of the original arched windows. The result is a subtle tension between old and new, a sense of things shifting and intertwining, that underscores the museum's message: The past is important, but the future is the place to be.

See the November 2001 issue of Architectural Record for full coverage of this project.

Formal name of Project:
The Women's Museum: An Institute For the Future

Location:
Fair Park, Dallas, Tex.

Gross square footage:
70, 000 sq. ft.

Total construction cost:
$11.5 million

Owner:
The Women's Museum

Architect:
Wendy Evans Joseph Architects