Tuned instrument: Piano's arts museum in Dallas rivals Kahn's in neighbouring Fort Worth in lucidity and the subtle use of limpid light

Architectural Review, The, June, 2004 by Peter Buchanan

Combining a gallery and walled garden, both displaying works in its collection, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas joins Tadao Ando's recent Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (AR August 2003) in further consolidating the neighbouring cities as a major art destination within the US. The Nasher is also the latest of a family of museums the Renzo Piano Building Workshop has built so that the public might enjoy exceptional private collections of modern art. Like the Menil Collection (AR March 1987) and Beyeler Museum (AR December 1997), its galleries are lit through an all-glass roof, although here all sun-control devices are above the glass that is also the gallery ceilings. Also, while the Menil's external walls are the same grey clapboard as the surrounding bungalows, and the Beyeler's are clad in a stone resembling the streaky red sandstone of Basle, the Nasher does not adopt a material found in its immediate locality. Instead it is clad inside and out in travertine, as is Louis Kahn's Kimbell Museum of Art in Fort Worth (AR November 1978). This, and the top-lit vaulted galleries, suggest a deliberate dialogue with what many deem the last unarguably great American work of architecture, a dialogue set up by a new building that, despite evoking a mythic past, is as light and contemporary in feel as the Kimbell is heavy and archaic.

Since the 1960s, real-estate developer Raymond Nasher and his late wife, Patsy, amassed an outstanding collection of modern art, concentrated mainly on sculpture. Now totalling some 350 works, these were displayed in their house and garden--and some, so the public might encounter and enjoy them, in Nasher's North Park shopping centre. The sculpture centre now allows the public to view these works displayed on a rotating basis, which, along with visiting exhibitions and other events, should encourage regular revisits in a contemplative verdant oasis on the edge of the city centre. Nasher, having met Renzo Piano at the Beyeler opening, entrusted design of the museum to him and the garden to Peter Walker.

The 2.4-acre city-block site is in Dallas' Arts District, across the street from the Dallas Museum of Art and a block away from I. M. Pei's Meyerson Symphony Center, between the sleek, skystriving towers of downtown and a sunken motorway. The design challenge was to create a modestly scaled building that could belong to such a site, bereft of history and consistent contextual cues, overlooked by behemoths and edged by massive metropolitan-scaled infrastructure. Piano's initial instinctual response, poetic rather than rational, was to neither compete with nor conform to this context. Instead the new gallery is quiet and low, and subtly emphasizes the relative newness of the surrounding structures, which thus need not be deferred to, by suggesting his building springs from archaeological remnants that predate them. These remnants of earlier construction, between and around which the sculptures have seemingly been rediscovered, are the parallel tall stone walls dominating the gallery's plan, exterior and interior. (There is an irony here: Kahn advocated architecture that would make great ruins; but the stones of these 'ruins' are flimsy claddings that would soon fall away to reveal a complex mass of steel structure, ductwork and pipes.) Though few would recognize (and none be fooled by) the fantasy that sparked the design, the result is a building that nestles into place. The walls assert a footprint of the scale of the surrounding buildings, yet despite these prominent walls the building has a recessive and delicate grace that contrasts refreshingly with the muscularly chunky buildings that characterize Dallas.

Beyeler's design also grew from the generating gesture of parallel stone walls, although these are capped by an oversailing glass roof and faced internally in white plasterboard. Ranged parallel to the street, the main volume of galleries they define is entered from the lobby, side-on (as at the Kimbell) bringing some cross-axial stability to these elongated spaces. But the Nasher's stone-faced walls reach high above the vaulted roofs, providing anchorage for the tension ties supporting the midpoint of the roofs' curved steel beams. The walls are also perpendicular to the street, offering views from it, through the fully glazed ends of the bays they define, into the garden; and entrance is directly and end-on into one of these bays. Two of the other bays are galleries; the last bay at one end contains a shop, directors' offices and boardroom; the last bay at the other end a cafe and security centre. The entrance bay also gives access to the garden and, via a staircase, to the basement. Like the Beyeler, the building is much bigger than it first appears. In the basement are a further gallery (for works vulnerable to the bright light above), offices, kitchen and an auditorium that can extend through a sliding glass wall to stepped seating outdoors. Ringing this basement, and extending beyond the edge of the building above, is an extensive service area for mechanical plant and storage.