Museum Sprawl in Texas II: DFW

On a weekend in north Texas centered around the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, I was surprised to discover museum sprawl - a landscape of the best institutions oil can build, in sprawling suburban arts districts (Dallas) and cultural districts (Fort Worth).

Most of these pictures are from Dallas. We were lucky enough to visit the Dallas Arts District throughout the magic hour, the time of evening when the lights are visible inside and out. And most venues still had seats available!

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While many cities plan for arts and cultural districts, DFW actually has two. Planned, choreographed, implemented. And the result is surreal.

“The Dallas Arts District is the largest arts district in the nation, spanning 68 acres and 19 contiguous blocks.” (http://www.thedallasartsdistrict.org/district). Crikey! Dallas's Cultural District was like the heroic modernist version of San Francisco's Civic Center, but with San Francisco's unity replaced by diversity in Dallas, San Francisco’s chorus replaced by a dozen Texan soloists. The San Francisco Civic Center’s common architectural language, in its many dialects, replaced by a dozen personal languages, the languages of modern international architects, all collected in the district. Bold works by I.M. Pei, Lord Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Allied Works, SOM, REX. The district is supported by lots of underground parking and not much else. Its main illness, like many districts, is that it is essentially single-use. The district sort of includes a small park atop a freeway. Lined with food trucks, the park was mobbed on weekend afternoons.

Get beyond the architectural cacophony to experience what these facilities house: great art collections, a top notch symphony, opera, dance, theatre. The City Performance Hall was purpose built, by the City, for smaller under-600 seat productions. The Dallas Art Museum, terribly planned and terribly dated, has a comprehensive collection like a miniature Met in New York City. Amongst many excellent pieces, the centerpiece of their American Art collection is Watch (below) from 1925 by Gerald Murphy, one of my favorite paintings by one of my favorite painters. This was the diamond amidst the semi-precious load.

Back in Fort Worth, a significant cultural district has grown around the Kimbell Art Museum. Within a few blocks, numerous institutions are sprinkled amongst lots of parking and wide roads. The Fort Work Cultural District rivals Dallas’s in architectural horsepower (Kahn, Piano, Legorretta, Schwarz, Johnson, Ando), but the works are generally more subdued, more relaxed and more calm.  Across the street from the Kimbell is the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, an austere and spacious work in concrete designed by Tadao Ando. The Ando building is finely clocked, thoughtfully designed and carefully detailed, in many aspects an homage to Kahn. Very expensive building, generously spaced artworks – all Texan in scale.

SFO v. DFW: Triumph of the District

DFW International Airport serves the Dallas- Fort Worth area, an area of continuous low-scale development, from Dallas west to Arlington west to Fort Worth. Much like the landscape of San Francisco’s peninsula, the towns have grown into each other, blending along endless arterial strips and intercity highways.

The District is the planner’s solution for locating buildings of the same type. Buildings that may not make great neighbors on their own are assigned to a district. Seattle has Pill Hill (hospitals) and the U District (University of Washington). San Francisco has Mission Bay (medical R&D and university) and the Civic Center. And many American cities have the dreaded CBD, the Central Business District of midrise towers, structured parking, and empty evenings.

 

Museum Sprawl in Texas I: The Kimbell @ 40

We took a weekend in central Texas to make a long-imagined architectural pilgrimage to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Designed by Louis Kahn, it was completed in 1972. We took lots of pictures, and even did some sketching. Over a three day weekend we went four times - the lighting was different each time: cloudy day, sunny day, magic hour, night time.

The Kimbell Museum is one of the last great works of modern architecture, both heroic and modest, designed by a man with the same characteristics, Louis I. Kahn. Kahn was an accomplished architect and teacher, of local renown, before 50. And yet we remember him for nothing he did before 50. After 50, he had a prolific 2 decades, designing some of the world's greatest buildings, and getting many, but not all, built.

I've seen most of Kahn's major mature work in the United States - the Salk Institute, the Richards Lab, the Yale buildings, the Bryn Mawr dorm. Exeter Library is the jewel, the ideal city. But the Kimbell requires a special trip, located in the center of Texas and off my natural and familial travel itineraries. One does not casually, accidentally visit the Kimbell while in the neighborhood.

Kahn is teachable, I think that's part of his staying power and enduring appeal to educators and eager young students. Kahn brough tthe discipline of his his beaux-arts education to the modern, majestic expression concrete and masonry space and form. Kahn's work, like Corbu's, can loosely be separated into wall buildings and column buildings, and some hybrids. The Kimbell is a column building, square columns in fact, with infill walls. The most carefully detailed building I have ever seen, with precision and material awareness. As my old boss Robert Frear would say, its "clocked". It has grids and systems and violations.

The Kimbell is monumental on the outside and almost intimately small on the inside. Like Exeter Library, the building is built of almost entirely real, natural materials. The only drywall used was on the planar walls holding up the paintings. Otherwise it was lots and lots of concrete, sheet steel, and limestone. And not much else. The museum is very small, with not all that much gallery space! But an exquisite collection. Beautiful, fine works, limited in number but exceptionally high in quality. Recent acquisitions include paintings by Michelangelo and Caravaggio and a building by Renzo Piano. A small, busy cafe, three exquisite courtyards, and no donor wall at all. Also a very good bookstore and lots of parking.

Here are some pictures:
(Note: you can scroll through the slideshow below, on this website; or click below to see them bigger at Shutterfly.)

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I read Deconstructing the Kimbell in about 1998, at a time when I yearned to connect contemporary architectural theory with a building that was designed following considerations of site, program, space, light, and tectonics. Over the next few years I learned that not all theories are operational, and analysis and synthesis are not necessarily complementary endeavours.

The Kimbell is stunning, rigid, austere, cold, and spacious. But in the end it is forever serene and sublime.

It was a great to finally experience the Kimbell @ 40.