View from Dallas: Susan Lasdun responds to Dallas with typical European horror - but close examination gives grounds for hope - View - architecture

Architectural Review, The, July, 2002 by Susan Lasdun

As my plane touched down at Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, I wondered how closely this oil-rich city would match my preconceptions -- would it be as over the top as I expected? Learning from my driver that the airport was larger than the whole of Manhattan Island and had more runways (seven) than any airport in the world, hardly surprised me. Nor was I thrown when we passed a replica of the Crystal Palace, a store for state-of-the-art telecommunication companies. Still, I couldn't quite gauge how tongue-in-cheek it had been on the part of the architect/client to reinvent Paxton's masterpiece for such a purpose, or whether there was perhaps no conscious irony in it at all.

After another fifteen minutes of urban sprawl, we passed a vast, overblown complex of offices, hotel and shops called The Crescent. Truly elephantine in scale, its retro architecture of mansard roofs, dormer windows and arched entrances was by none other than Philip Johnson. I began to feel my preconceptions were on target.

However, just after passing The Crescent, Downtown Dallas suddenly came into view, forming an immediately arresting and dramatic skyline. It consisted of a surprisingly small group of skyscrapers, including one very elegant green glass shaft. Though not the tallest, this stood out among other higher less distinguished buildings. It was I. M. Pei's 'trapezoidal' Fountain Place, an office block built in 1986.

Downtown Dallas is small in relation to the unruly spread surrounding it. Much of it having been demolished in recent years, it now consists of a six block grid of streets with only one department store and no food shop. This was the result of the flight to the country in the 1960s, which generated the development of new suburbs and the swallowing up of nearby small towns into Dallas. The first out-of-town shopping centres in the world were built to serve these expanding areas. This new pattern of life left downtown Dallas dead after 6.00 pm, as office workers left for their suburban homes. Consequently many unwanted downtown buildings were pulled down. I never thought when I returned to downtown after three days of driving around Dallas's amorphous low-density suburbs, that it would be such a relief to be contained in a grid of streets and able to walk from one to the other.

The architecture of the new suburbs or neighbourhoods has plundered most historic styles. My driver pointed out Ross Perot's Tudor mansion with what seemed to be a Regency Gothick window. An even more popular style in one of the newest and classiest residential areas was 'French Chateau'. Each mansion outdoes its neighbour in size and elaboration. They are generally turreted and fronted by immaculate lawns with a fleet of large cars parked along the drives.

However, as I have learnt about the USA, whatever one thinks is the truth, the opposite is also true; in this case, just waiting to be discovered around the corner. After passing that astonishing parade of grandiose homes flaunting affluence, we turned into a small lane and were met with a discreet barred gate with just an entry button -- no house in view. We had come to see the Stretto house designed by Steven Holl. This modern house laid out in four sections formed a series of internal spaces flowing into one another and ultimately leading through to an outdoor courted area with a swimming pool -- a quiet rectangle of water instead of the usual banal blue gash in the landscape. Along with its small guest pavilion, this long and straight low house was wonderfully integrated into its site and complemented a sinuous stretch of water created in the garden from three spring-fed ponds. With understated rather wild planting, using the trees indigenous to the site, the whole experience was one of those quiet strand s of excellence which also turn out to be a part of Dallas.

Nearby and equally discreet was a simple brick house built in the 1970s. This small property houses an astounding collection of Pre-Colombian art mostly dug in the 1950s by its owners, together with an even more astonishing collection of nineteenth and twentieth century paintings and sculpture, the latter spilling over into the garden. The great masters are all there, making it one of the largest and finest private collections, particularly of sculpture, in the world. Raymond Nasher and his late wife Patsy formed this superb collection and recently Ray Nasher has given it to the City of Dallas. Renzo Piano has been commissioned to design a new two-storey building in collaboration with landscape architect, Peter Walker who will design a two-acre sculpture garden. The Center will open in 2003.

Nasher is a property developer and banker who built the North Park Shopping Center in the '60s, the first of its kind. It won a number of prizes and is still regarded as architecturally the best around. It was also one of thc first to display sculpture in a commercial setting; in this case from Nasher's own collection.

At present, many of the public art and music venues in Dallas lie in their own compounds off a freeway and are unrelated to each other or to much else around them. The existing home for Dallas opera is right on the edge of Dallas, in Fair Park. The Dallas Museum of Art, a modern building by Edward Barnes, also felt isolated, despite being located on the map in an area called the Arts District and a downtown address.