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

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Outside and inside, the pale neutrally coloured natural materials of the travertine walls and white oak floors predominate, enlivened by the contrast with the white steel roof structure and sun-shading panels, which are clearly visible through the super-white glass roof, and the charcoal grey frames of the fully glazed walls. The travertine is used unconventionally: instead of showing the usual vertically sliced faces of horizontal beds of stone separated by holes, it has been sliced horizontally, along rather than across the beds, and pressure hosed to expose a rough and varied pitted surface. The stone slabs (30mm outside and 20mm inside, where the pitting has been filled) have then been so skilfully matched and mitred as to give the impression of thick solid blocks.

The main street facade is low key; the eye is caught mainly by the contrast between the tall, substantial stone piers and the graceful slightness of the slender steel beams that spring and are suspended between them. (The tension ties justify the height of the walls and reveal these to be curved beams rather than arches. Yet they are the one element of the building that will probably look passe with time: they are too High-Tech and nothing dates as fast as the futuristic.) The relationship between the street and the galleries inside is not as intrusively immediate as is suggested by the open-ended, perpendicular orientation. Planting and porches distance the sidewalk from the glass walls--and the piers stepping forward further relieve any abruptness, not least by introducing a slot of space parallel to the pavement. This interruption enhances the separation and makes more intricate the flow of space. It is easy to imagine Kahn describing these piers as breaking away from the walls to begin their evolution into properly articulate columns that create distance and dignifying decorum; some sense of this is in fact subliminally suggested.

Even the main entrance lacks emphasis, revealed only by the omission of planting in front of it. Once in and past the ticket desk, a cross-axial enfilade of openings slicing right through the building, and the generous stairs downward, suddenly reveal the extent of the whole building, as if offering itself in a gesture of welcome. The immediate impression in the entrance hall and galleries is of the twin touchstones Piano is apt to repeat mantra-like, 'lightness and transparency', here revealed in the weightless roof and the bright light that floods through it as well as in the pervasive presence of sky and garden visible through the roof and end walls. All this, together with the stone walls, recalls a Victorian conservatory or orangery rather than a conventional museum, and is only possible because most sculpture, unlike paintings, is not vulnerable to light.

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