Exquisite simplicity isn’t easy to pull off. But when the Nasher Sculpture Center opens its doors later this month, downtown Dallas–with its flashy skyscrapers and roaring traffic–will become an art lover’s nirvana. Trust me on this: if you give a hoot about modern art, modern design or both, go to Dallas and follow your bliss to this two-acre city block of unexpected serenity. At first look, the $70 million museum seems unprepossessing: a low-slung building right at street level, set between the Dallas Museum of Art and I. M. Pei’s Meyerson concert hall. (The entire street is slated to be a cultural corridor, with plans for an opera house by Norman Foster, a theater by Rem Koolhaas and an arts high school by the hot Oregon architect Brad Cloepfil.) But Piano is a master of subtle effects: where some architects shout, he whispers. The flawless proportions and perfectly detailed travertine and glass make the place a jewel–modern and timeless, solid and light. “The transparency is such that the garden is a continuation of the gallery,” says Piano. “And the museum is like a piece of the garden but with a roof.” And that roof is a wonderful Piano invention–a sunscreen of cast aluminum that lets natural north light flood the galleries and allows you to look up and see the big Texas sky. Back in 1986, Piano had pulled off a similarly subtle feat for another great Texas art collection with his Menil museum in Houston. That building, as well as the Beyeler Collection in Switzerland, convinced Nasher that Piano was the man for the job.
Nasher and his wife started collecting in the ’50s, picking up pre-Columbian pieces in Mexico–“for $5, $10, $25,” he recalls. Then in the early ’60s, Patsy gave Ray a Jean Arp sculpture for his birthday, and their modern collection was launched. When Nasher built one of the first shopping centers, NorthPark in Dallas, he installed major pieces there, and other works were placed on the eight acres of rolling greenery outside their Dallas home–an unpretentious modern brick house designed in 1949 by a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, with huge windows that give wonderful views of the collection inside and out. Nasher, 81, still lives there, and he’ll miss some of the pieces that are going downtown. “When you get up in the morning, and you suddenly see a beautiful Matisse, it peps you up and makes you feel like life is worth living,” he says. But at least one piece isn’t going anywhere: that first Jean Arp from his wife.
“Inevitably, the spirit and simplicity of the house is there” in the museum, Piano says. But doesn’t the design, with its buttery travertine walls and gently vaulted roofs, also echo the Kimbell Museum in Ft. Worth by the late genius Louis Kahn? “Yes, absolutely,” says Piano. “The Kimbell is imprinted in my deep memory.” As a young architect–before he achieved overnight fame by co-designing the Pompidou Center in Paris–Piano worked with Kahn on the Olivetti factory in Harrisburg, Pa.
The Nasher center is the first of several new U.S. projects for Piano. He’s designing expansions to the High Museum in Atlanta, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Morgan Library in New York. He’s also working on the California Academy of Sciences, the skyscraper headquarters of The New York Times, a master plan for Columbia University in Harlem and a new building for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. To an architect of great inventiveness and elegant craftsmanship, we say, welcome back.
