DTD | Arts District: Nasher Sculpture Center

[ianbryant]

Here's another article...this one is from the dallas morning news...it's about the acquisition of a sculpture by Picasso for the nasher sculpture garden and the overall progress of the development.

A heady addition for Nasher center
Revolutionary Picasso piece to get face time in Dallas' Arts District

02/01/2002

By JANET KUTNER / The Dallas Morning News

As the columns rise for the landmark Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas' Arts District, the collection it will house has grown a head taller.

And what a head!

Sotheby's Picasso's "Head of a Woman," a 10-foot-tall concrete-and-gravel sculpture from 1958, is the first acquisition announced for the Nasher Sculpture Garden, which is scheduled to open in spring 2003 in Dallas' downtown Arts District.

Raymond D. Nasher, whose $50 million complex is scheduled to open in spring 2003, has purchased a 10-foot-tall Picasso sculpture, Head of a Woman.

The revolutionary piece, dubbed "the mother of them all" by Picasso's daughter, was created in 1958 in an unusual concrete-and-gravel process that the artist had just begun to explore.

It's the first purchase Mr. Nasher has made public since construction began last year. He bought the sculpture through a Paris dealer for an undisclosed price. Art experts estimate its value between $2 million and $4 million. And he said this is only the beginning.

"I'm always on the lookout for major works," he said. "We constantly want to improve the collection."

Assembled by the Dallas philanthropist and his late wife since the 1960s, it is widely regarded as the world's most important private collection of modern sculpture. Valued at more than $300 million, the collection boasts more than 300 works by such artists as Matisse, Miro, Calder and Moore.

Sculptures will be shown on a rotating basis at the center, which will feature a 55,000-square-foot building by architect Renzo Piano and landscaped grounds on 2.4 acres. The project will be paid for by the Nasher Foundation, which owns the art.

Mr. Nasher first heard about the Picasso while visiting Mr. Piano in Turin, Italy.

"I hopped on a plane and flew to Paris, where I fell in love with it immediately," Mr. Nasher said. Next year's unveiling "is going to be an incredible happening. Basically, the sculpture has never been seen, because it was made for a Norwegian family that kept it in their Oslo garden."

The multifaceted sculpture, with a monumental head mounted on a tall, thin column or neck, is perfectly suited to a park setting.

"It's vitally important that it be viewed from 360 degrees, because it has multiple profiles that could never be seen from just one angle," Mr. Nasher said.

He owns six other Picasso sculptures, making his one of the most complete representations of the artist's sculpture outside the Picasso Museum in Paris.

And his new find has special significance.

"It was the first piece of only 20 Picasso did in concrete and gravel, which is why his daughter Maya calls it 'the mother of them all,' " Mr. Nasher said.

The artist had explored the idea of constructing the human head from flat planes that intersect vertically in drawings and models, but a unique process developed by Norwegian Karl Nesjar allowed Picasso to blow them up to a scale he had only dreamed of.

"It's a grand addition to the modernist core of the greatest private collection in the world," said Jack Lane, director of the Dallas Museum of Art.

"It adds a midcentury work by one of the geniuses of the 20th century to sculpture by him that's already in the collection from the very beginning," he said, referring to Picasso's vigorously modeled plaster Head of Fernande, done in 1909.

Meanwhile, the Nasher Center now has a visible presence, across the street from the Dallas Museum of Art. All of the concrete structural work is finished, and the steel columns for the building are going up.

People driving by now have a sense of its size. It won't be long before grass is planted and the roof and sunscreen are installed, Mr. Nasher said.

Between 25 and 30 large outdoor sculptures will be on view at any time in the garden, with smaller works, such as a painted sheet-metal head by Picasso that is closely related to the new piece, displayed inside glass pavilions. The building has two levels, which will contain galleries, an auditorium, a conservation lab, educational facilities, a cafe and a bookstore.

[crescentboi]

The new center is supposed to open on October 19, 2003 according to the official website. Here are some facts on the project.

-The building is a 54,000 sqft building designed by Renzo Piano, which will house gallery spaces, bookstore, auditorium and cafe.
-The Garden covers almost 3/4 of the 2.4 acre property and will house fountains, groves of trees, small meadows and ponds.
-The $60million project is completely funded by The Nasher Foundation.

[freewaytincan]

I will certainly say that Piano is much improved since his "inside exposed" and "random colors" phase(s), as best personified as the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It's absolutely awfu. Especially inside the escalator. Ugh. But he's much better now, and I like what I see.

[jsoto3]

i'll have to disagree with you on the pompidou. that building is amazing, a modern architecture revolutionary/classic. the plaza is quite nice too. i can't think of a better place to have lunch in paris than on the rooftop cafe at the pompidou center. but i think you and i are on opposite sides of the aethetic tracks, so we'll have to agree to disagree. i suppose you probably hate the grande bibliotheque and la defense, huh?

[gc]

urban...jsoto....Can one of you guys send me a good of some of those places....I have no clue what you are talking about!

[jsoto3]

pompidou center (richard rogers and renzo piano, 1976):

http://www.joel-benford.co.uk/photography/paris_2001/pompidou_exterior_1.JPG

http://dalesorenson.com/digital_photography/2001_paris/pictures/dscn0708.html

view from:
http://website.education.wisc.edu/ajy/Photos/PompidouV.jpg

view to plaza below:
http://www.musicman.com/dag/pomp.jpg


grande bibliotheque de france (domonique perrault, mid-90's):

http://www.quebecoislibre.org/TGB.jpg

http://www.pele.org/shop/TresGrandeBibliotheque3A-G.jpg


la defense (hyper-modern CBD on periphery, various architects, late 70's - present):

http://www.investinfrancena.org/news/newsletter/gif/ladefense.jpg

view down champs elysees, le grande arche at end:
http://www.oir.ucf.edu/wm/paris/img/paris.defense.jpg

http://astrosun.tn.cornell.edu/~akgun/Photo/parisdefend.jpg

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~sedwards/photos/paris2002/Images/P3041804%20La%20Defense%20Plaza.jpg

http://www.upaep.mx/puebla/www5/image4.jpg

http://www.cs.tcd.ie/Greg.Biegel/photos/ladefense.jpg

http://magmod.u-paris10.fr/defense.jpg

http://billhocker.com/france2/elevator2.jpg

http://www.slavon.ru/en/big/defens_br_big.jpg

[freewaytincan]

Actually, much of La Defense is incredible. I really like it. Clean and polished. I just happen to think conventionally; the air ducts and water pipes belong inside!

The escalators are like freakish, huge hamster cages. But the views are incredible. When I have time, I'll be doing a lot of scanning, and there are a lot from la Centre Pompidou. :D

[jsoto3]

btw, don't get me wrong, i like 'historical' architecture as much as the next guy, when it is original, not rehashed like the crescent. also, i do not believe all architecture should be 'shiny modern.' i think this type of architecture should be the exception, not the rule, used only on important buildings. everything else should be 'background architecture,' understated, less void (transparency/glass) than solid (masonry, etc.), yet it should still be contemporary, clean, simple, no frills/ornamentation, applique, etc. like this:

[downtownbum]

damn i wanna go to paris now!!

[tamtagon]

pompidou center rocks, dallas should be so lucky

[gc]

wow, thanks for the pics. Those were awesome!

[Hunter Wadle]

Are there any recent pictures of the Nasher sculpture garden?

[mdunlap1]

There's a temporary website up for the Nasher Sculpture Center: Nasher Sculpture Center (http://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/) .

:p

[gc]

Sculpting a cultural icon
Nasher aims to bridge gap between public, artistic tastes
02:07 PM CDT on Saturday, September 27, 2003
By DAVID FLICK / The Dallas Morning News
http://www.dallasnews.com/localnews/stories/092803dnmetpopularity.d7300.html

Critical acclaim is nice, but Steven Nash, director of the Nasher Sculpture Center, also wants Dallas' newest cultural institution to be a hit with the public.

For one thing, admission receipts are good for the bottom line. And attendance figures can help with grant applications. But in the final analysis, everybody wants to be liked.

"You want a sense of excitement about your institution and a feeling that the public likes and is attracted to what you have to offer," he said.

"You can't be arrogant and have the attitude that if you build a museum they will come."

The Oct. 20 opening of the center is widely anticipated by the international arts community. The $70 million museum and gardens will house sculpture collected by Raymond Nasher, developer of NorthPark Center, and his late wife, Patsy.

The $400 million collection has been praised by scholars and critics, and pieces of it are already familiar to shoppers at NorthPark, where some of the works have long been displayed.

Many factors can contribute to the popularity of a museum, such as its setting, accessibility, gift shop and cafe. The quality of the building is crucial, said Stephen Weil, scholar emeritus at the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies in Washington, D.C.

But some of the public reaction has nothing to do with the art or the space in which it resides, he said.

"A lot of it has to do with personal experience. They bring along other people, and much of whether they enjoy themselves has to do with how they react with the people they came with," Mr. Weil said.

A diverse collection is important, but so is a floor plan that logically guides people directly to the art, he said.

In recent interviews with patrons at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the most common complaint about museums was that they often gave visitors too little information about the art on display.

"That big rusting thing out front [Vortex, by Richard Serra] is interesting," said Rick Michel of Dallas, "but I wish there was something that would tell me more about it."

Some visitors said they liked museums that were small enough that they didn't feel lost, but large enough that they didn't feel rushed or crowded.

"I like large spaces so people aren't pushed together. If it gets too busy, you can't get a good look at things," said Troy Blume of Fort Worth.

Image is important


Gary Edson, director of Texas Tech University's Center for the Advanced Study of Museum Science and Heritage Management, said new museums typically experience a rush of popularity when they open. But to sustain attendance, the institution's image must be cultivated.
"It's important to establish credibility by bringing in quality exhibits and acquiring new pieces," he said. "It doesn't have to be constant adding to the collection, but it has to be a pattern of consistently acquiring quality work.

"You're encouraging people to return to see what there is new to see."

In that regard, the Nasher Sculpture Center has a built-in draw.

The center will feature rotating exhibits from the 350-piece Nasher collection, generally regarded as the finest private collection of modern and contemporary sculpture in the world.

Indoor, outdoor settings


The works will be displayed in a museum and a landscaped park setting. Visitors can look from the front door, through the exhibition galleries, to the sculpture garden beyond, sampling the entire collection in a glance.
"People will enjoy the aesthetics of the facility; the quality of the collection is of the highest order, and there are many types of sculpture that will attract a really widespread group of people," Mr. Edson said.

In addition, the center will help people understand what they're seeing.

The cost of admission – $10 for adults, $7 for seniors and $5 for students – will include audiotaped information about the work and the artist. Maps of the sculpture garden will include pithy descriptions of each piece, Mr. Nash said.

Because popular attitudes toward a museum are influenced by such things as the quality of its gift shop and cafe and even by the accessibility of its parking lot, Mr. Edson said, a balancing act results: A museum director needs to appeal to the public and at the same time be the guardian of artistic standards.

"At the root of what a museum is, is to be a place where art and people interact. Good things happen when they do," said Marla Price, director of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

On the other hand, she said, "if popularity were the only criteria, we'd be operating Six Flags."

Education's role

The key to reconciling the two goals is education – either through school or outreach programs or by merely handing out audiotapes in the museum galleries, Mr. Weil said.
Museums have to appeal to people with a wide range of tastes and education while not becoming so diffused that they lose their purpose, he said.

It's not easily accomplished, he said, but it's worth it.

"I think it's important for a museum to be popular," Mr. Weil said. "These days a museum can't afford not to be popular."

E-mail dflick@dallasnews.com

[gc]

Here is a copy of the Nasher Press Release I revieved today:



September 29, 2003

The only downtown indoor-outdoor sculpture museum in the world, built to house one of the finest private collections of modern and contemporary sculpture, opens on October 20 in Dallas. Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano, the Center features the internationally acclaimed Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection of modern and contemporary sculpture.

The Nasher Sculpture Center is a monument to grace. In an urban setting of concrete and glass, the Sculpture Center is an oasis of trees and greenery.

I would personally like to extend an invitation to you and your organization to join us for a special opening event. The Building of the Nasher Sculpture Center will feature architect Renzo Piano discussing the Center’s evolution from concept to fruition. Additionally, founder and chairman Raymond Nasher and Director Dr. Steven Nash will provide valuable insight on this remarkable journey. Held at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center at 2 p.m. on Friday October 17, 2003, the event is free an open to the public. Further information on can be found in the attached sheet.

A member of our team will be contacting you in the next week to answer any questions you may have. In the meantime, we appreciate you spreading the word about this unique opportunity within your organization.


Sincerely yours,

Krista Farber Weinstein
Director of Marketing and Development
Nasher Sculpture Center

[gc]

State of the Art
Renowned collector's labor of love was more than 50 years in the making
By Peyton D. Woodson - Star-Telegram Staff Writer
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/6923557.htm

DALLAS - Nestled in the shadows of towering downtown skyscrapers, a sanctuary is taking shape. Picasso and Rodin, Matisse and Moore, Calder and Giacometti: The masters of modern sculpture reside here, in a $70 million matrix of stone and earth.

The Nasher Sculpture Center, opening Oct. 20, marks the culmination of five decades of art collecting by real estate developer Raymond Nasher and his late wife, Patsy.

It also marks the arrival of Dallas as a prime destination in the art world.

"Anyone with a serious interest in modern sculpture will, at some point in their lifetime, want to see the Nasher," said Timothy Potts, director of Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum. "When it's done at this level of quality, it becomes a real magnet. A jewel."

The sculpture center is adjacent to the Dallas Museum of Art and occupies a downtown block along Flora Street. The 54,000-square-foot building designed by acclaimed architect Renzo Piano is awash in travertine marble walls and features indoor galleries.

Its glass doors and airy design open to a half-acre sculpture garden that will allow visitors to experience the art up close and personal.

All told, the center will showcase more than 100 pieces from Nasher's collection, which includes more than 300 works that have been shown in museums from Madrid to Tel Aviv.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York have each mounted exhibits of the collection.

Nasher, 81, was one of the first developers to place large-scale public art in commercial complexes, including Dallas' NorthPark Center. Nasher said he considered building his sculpture center in other cities, but "finally I determined it was the opportunity to perhaps try to bring something to Dallas that could not be done in any other city in the world."

"If Dallas had a building that was the best of its kind ... and the garden, and we could have lectures and seminars ... perhaps that would be the way of saying that Dallas was the center of modern sculpture in the world," he said.

Combined with the recent opening of the Latino Cultural Center, the Nasher could usher in a new era in the Dallas arts district.

"We've been hoping the arts district would become a vibrant center of cultural activity," said Judy Conner, director of marketing and communications for the Dallas Museum of Art. "What we're all hoping for is for the arts district to become a pedestrian-friendly district where people can enjoy the arts and culture."

Dallas has been overshadowed by a swirl of activity in Fort Worth's cultural district -- last year's opening of the $65 million Modern Art Museum, a massive expansion at the Amon Carter Museum and the opening of the Cowgirl Hall of Fame in 2002.

"Before, if you were an art enthusiast and you landed at D/FW, you were going to run over to Fort Worth," said Patricia B. Meadows, curator of the Texas Sculpture Garden at Hall Office Park in Frisco. "Now you're going to need more time because you'll also need to go to Dallas."

•

Raymond and Patsy Nasher began collecting art in 1950.

"We really only purchased pieces that gave us the butterflies," Nasher said. "We just intended to have pieces that we enjoyed and liked to live with and loved to see. We had the good fortune that most of them are masterpieces."

Nasher's collection, which includes works by John Storrs, Paul Gauguin and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, is widely considered the finest private collection of modern art in the world. Art aficionados are frequent visitors to his North Dallas home, which houses many of the sculptures.

"It's a priceless collection," said Tim Nentrup, president of Displays Unlimited, a Fort Worth company that is preparing many of the works for transfer from Nasher's home to the center. "Therefore, moving the stuff -- it has to be packaged as if nothing in the world can happen to it. We have to make custom crates. It's very much a science involved in it."

Although the sculpture will be the focus at the Nasher, the building will be a major draw as well. Known for his use of natural light, Piano, who designed the Georges Pompidous Centre in Paris and the Menil Collection in Houston, used an egg-crate design for the ceiling of the indoor galleries that allows the entrance of northern light, but blocks other forms of sunlight that would harm the sculptures.

The building has a continuous flow that pushes visitors through the galleries and into the sculpture garden. Landscape architect Peter Walker designed an outside space that includes a reflecting pond and tree-lined walkways that provide intimate access to the nearly 30 sculptures, including Alexander Calder's Three Bollards, Jonathon Borofsky's Hammering Man and Picasso's Head of a Woman, 1958.

"For the serious viewer, there will be the opportunities to return often to study and familiarize themselves with the work," said Fort Worth sculptor Alice Bateman.

"Sculpture has a way of revealing its secrets slowly through meditation and patient interrogation."

For sculpture novices, there are other draws to the center, including a cafe catered by the famed Mansion on Turtle Creek, lecture programs and a chamber concert series featuring members of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. The cost of admission, $10 for adults, $7 for seniors and $5 for students, will include audio tours.

But the value of the new center will be far greater than the sum of its parts, said Potts, the Kimbell's director.

"There's a great excitement in the art community," he said. "Everyone realizes the building is going to be a wonderful achievement. And the collection ... is really outstanding -- quite simply the finest of late 19th and 20th century sculpture in this country.

"That combination is a magic one."

Sculpture center

The Nasher Sculpture Center, 2001 Flora St., Dallas

Opens: Oct. 20.

Admission: $10 adults, $7 senior citizens, $5 students

Information: (214) 242-5100

Also: Learn about the creation of the Nasher Sculpture Center from collector Raymond Nasher, architect Renzo Piano and center director Steven Nash at a free lecture Oct. 17 at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, adjacent to the new sculpture garden. Doors open at 1:30 p.m.; the program begins at 2.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Staff Writer Tim Madigan Contributed to This Report.
ONLINE: www.NasherSculptureCenter.org
Peyton D. Woodson, (817) 390-7539 pdwoodson@star-telegram.com

[gc]

Nasher Sculpture Center making quiet debut
In the old days, the city went all out for new attractions, so where is the fanfare?
07:14 AM CDT on Monday, October 6, 2003
By VICTORIA LOE HICKS / The Dallas Morning News
http://www.dallasnews.com/localnews/stories/100603dnmetspruceup.29fb0.html

"From patriotic paper napkins to Pavarotti's profile in chocolate, Dallas was making it clear Friday that it is prepared to play host."

It was a different century when those words were penned – and in many ways, a different world.

The journalist who once chronicled the spasm of no-excess-barred hoopla that attended the 1984 Republican National Convention is now mayor of Dallas, preparing for her role in the rarefied festivities that will mark the Oct. 20 opening of the Nasher Sculpture Center.

The $70 million museum and gardens next to the Dallas Museum of Art will house the $400 million sculpture collection of Raymond Nasher, developer of NorthPark Center, and his late wife, Patsy.

One of the few constants over the last two decades has been Dallas' hunger for the world's approval, and its faith that the next big event, the next big project will finally secure it.

"We're a young city, and this is a real turning point," convention planner Jennifer Cutrer said on the eve of the 1984 GOP bash. "It's almost like our coming-out ball."

"This is something akin to Dallas' first date with the world," City Council member Veletta Forsythe Lill said last week. "We want to make sure everything is just right so we'll be asked on a second date."

But two decades down the road to romance, the scope and the tone of the city's wooing are notably altered – partly by choice and partly by necessity.

A subtle distinction


Celebrities and herds of longhorns may wow the delegates from Des Moines, but the art cognoscenti who beat a path from Basel to Bilbao to Marfa and now to Dallas are a different breed.
In time-honored Dallas fashion, Mayor Laura Miller originally envisioned the Nasher opening as the impetus for a citywide – or at least downtown-wide – extravaganza. But those visions quietly died in the face of polite but emphatic disinterest from Mr. Nasher.

"I had a vision of little footsteps leading from the Nasher to Neiman Marcus to the West End," Ms. Miller said with a laugh. "I think that wasn't an aesthetically appealing idea to them."

"Ray has wanted this to be very understated," confirmed Krista Farber Weinstein, the center's marketing director. "He wanted it to be about the art. He wanted it to be about the center."

Which didn't ruffle the mayoral feathers one bit, Ms. Miller said.

"When a man spends $70 million of his own money to install his own sculpture collection, he can do whatever he wants, as far as I'm concerned," she said.

Project roadblocks


Meanwhile, other city projects compatible with the Nasher sensibilities foundered on the shoals of bureaucracy. They include adding trees and benches to several downtown streets and erecting new "way finding" signs to direct visitors to attractions such as the Latino Cultural Center and the West End.
The streetscaping project has been in the works for several years, and the money is in hand, but the designs weren't approved in time for the work to be completed by mid-October. So the project was quietly shelved until after the Nasher opening on the theory that drab, treeless sidewalks are better than attractive but half-constructed sidewalks.

"I specifically didn't want to start that and be mid-construction when the center opened," Ms. Miller said.

The problem with the signs – which must conform to rules governing signs in downtown's multiple "special purpose sign districts" – proved equally insoluble.

"It's incredible to me. I have no clue why we can't shake that loose," Ms. Miller said. "I've already fought and lost that battle."

Then there's the brutal reality that it's harder than ever to execute grand civic gestures in these financially strapped times.

"The city had just tons of money in 1984," said Ms. Lill, whose district includes the Nasher center and who chairs the council's arts committee.

Convention preparations included a citywide crackdown on code violations such as dilapidated structures, litter, overgrown weeds and junked cars. Inspectors descended en masse on everything from hotel and restaurant kitchens to the city's taxi fleet. Police redoubled efforts to get homeless people off downtown's streets.

Young and Wood streets, which led from the convention center to the convention's headquarters hotel, the Reunion Hyatt, were rebuilt as a lavishly landscaped one-way couplet system with brick crosswalks. Near the convention center, even the sewer lines got a special cleaning.

Business leaders plunged into fund raising, which netted nearly $5 million to stage the convention and entertain delegates.

Preparations for the Nasher opening are far less extensive or obvious to the casual eye, but they're not necessarily less complex, Ms. Lill said. Readying just the center's immediate environs, she said, has involved not only the city's police, parks, streets, public works and zoning arms but private landowners, other arts institutions, the Texas Department of Transportation and the Downtown Improvement District.

"The cast of characters is a large one," she said. "It's a Cecil B. DeMille one."

Laying the groundwork


Elm and Commerce streets got new asphalt, financed partly with county funds. The city planted $2 million worth of trees and spent $66,000 from the parks budget to spruce up the center's surroundings.
Cracked and broken curbs and sidewalks were repaired. Faded signs were replaced. Traffic signals were repainted and streets restriped. Obsolete utility poles were removed. Streetlights on adjacent streets got shields designed to keep the light from spilling over onto the sculptures.

Ms. Lill and First Assistant City Manager Mary Suhm drove the area, checking that every paving stone and light bulb were in place.

The public will get to hear from the center's creators at a public lecture Oct. 17 and will get their first good look at the garden Oct. 20. The week leading up to the public opening will be largely devoted to private dinners and receptions for those who have purchased memberships – which start at $75.

• On Friday, the Nasher staff will preview the center for their colleagues at other local and national art institutions, many of whom have provided advice during the center's gestation.

• Oct. 14 is media preview day.

• Oct. 15 is a black-tie gala for members who have paid $2,500 and up, plus guests of Comerica Bank, which Raymond Nasher founded and which is co-sponsoring the festivities. Expected attendance: 400 to 500.

• Oct. 17, the public is invited to a free talk by the center's architect, Renzo Piano. Mr. Nasher and center Director Stephen Nash also will speak. The event is at 2 p.m. at the Meyerson Symphony Center; the doors open at 1:30 p.m.

That night, Mr. Nasher will host a sit-down dinner at the Dallas Museum of Art for the artists who are represented in the collection, people who have $10,000 memberships and his personal friends. Expected attendance: 250 to 300.

• Oct. 18 and 19, the center will be open to all members from 1 to 8 p.m. Sunday morning also will see a brunch for members who joined at the $500 and $1,000 levels. Invitations sent: 130.

• Oct. 20, Ms. Miller, Mr. Nasher and other dignitaries will participate in a ribbon-cutting at 10 a.m. The garden will be open free to the public until 8 p.m.

Thereafter, admission will be $10 for adults, $7 for seniors and $5 for students.

The center will be open Tuesdays through Sundays from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., with additional evening hours on Thursdays until 9 p.m.

Nasher officials aren't opposed to participating in a wider cultural festival in six months or a year, Ms. Weinstein said, but for now they've got their hands full just trying to get the doors open and live up to Mr. Nasher's exacting standards.

"We want to be partners with the other arts organizations," she said. "But Ray really has focused on the center, on making every detail perfect."

E-mail vloe@dallasnews.com

[gc]

The Gift
by Jeffrey Hogrefe - D Magazine
http://www.dmagazine.com//article.asp?articleid=598

The Nasher Sculpture Center is an amazing structure that will attract people from all over the world to Dallas. Proprietor Ray Nasher, whose sculpture collection filss the center, and Renzo Piano, the world-renowned architect hired to build Nasher's vision, have given downtown a heart and Dallas a reason to stroll.

Renzo Piano was walking around downtown Dallas a few years ago, when he felt like someone was watching him. At 6-foot-3, he's hard to miss. And his gait can look a bit odd—perhaps because he's a Pritzker Prize-winning architect who has spent a considerable amount of time just thinking about the act of walking. In each of his jobs, during a career spanning more than 40 years, he uses leg power to "project a picture of the site onto my memory," as Piano, a native of Genoa, Italy, puts it in his expressive English. The first thing he noticed as he circumnavigated the site of the future Nasher Sculpture Center, which opens October 20, was that the enormous black glass boxes of downtown are "monsters that siphon life from sidewalks." The sparse number of pedestrians must have made him stand out, too.

As he measured off the site in long, looping strides, a couple of police officers pulled up in a cruiser. One leaned out the window to ask Piano a few questions. Seems they thought the imposing Italian looked a little suspicious, just walking around downtown like that.

Piano loves to tell the story about the time he was "almost arrested for walking in Dallas." The tale underscores the importance of his contribution to the city. The seemingly forbidden activity of walking has found a new purpose in the Nasher Sculpture Center, a 2-plus-acre oasis of greenery and glass-roofed gallery that houses one of the world's great collections of sculpture. Like the 19th-century glass arcades of Paris, which encouraged a new art of strolling in the age of Flaubert, Piano has created an occasion for a form of walking that has not existed in Dallas since the 1950s: a slow, leisurely amble, suitable to a Southern clime. He has suggested a new pace for the city by inserting into the volume of downtown a comparatively tiny, luminous structure set in a grove of mature trees, surrounded by 8- to 12-foot walls. From the street, the Nasher Sculpture Center appears almost buried. It creates, in effect, a sacred core for Dallas, like the one found in the Imperial Palace in the center of Tokyo or Trinity Church surrounded by skyscrapers on Wall Street.

Piano has excited interest in his garden, which was laid out by landscape architect Peter Walker, by enveloping it in a high wall of seamless skin. Glass insets reveal to passersby tantalizing glimpses of the garden the way a woman wearing a slit skirt reveals a bit of leg. The Nasher Sculpture Center is an incredibly sexy structure that will undoubtedly attract people from all over the world to Dallas who might have bypassed the city on the way to the Kimbell Art Museum and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. In fact, it may come to be seen as the trump card of the architectural trio. Piano's use of travertine, classical bays, and natural light turn the Nasher into a critique of the Kimbell, which incorporates the same elements. There are many parallels between the two structures. But whereas the Kimbell is a revered monument on a hill, Piano sees the Nasher as a catalyst for urban change.

In his initial brief, he referred to it as "The Sacred and the Profane"—just as a fountain in the center of an Italian hill city functions as a collective sacred space. It is his belief that in 50 years the sacred quality of the Nasher will have spilled out into the rest of downtown Dallas, the way a pebble forms ripples in a pond, and that Dallas itself will evolve into a sacred city. Presumptuous? Perhaps. But Piano is well-equipped to make such a prediction. In 1977, he expanded the pedestrian boundaries of Paris with his design (with Richard Rogers) of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Beaubourg. At the time, Beaubourg was a slum. Today it is one of the liveliest sections of the French capital. More recently, a Piano urban design redirected the flow of pedestrian traffic on the Potsdamer Platz, effecting the most significant change in the ceremonial core of Berlin since the fall of the Wall. "Architecture is about scale and form," Piano says. "But, more than anything, it is about people."

Architecture is about people, but it is also about a refinement of technique. On this count the Nasher stands as a marvel of engineering with few peers. The 55,000-square-foot building is put together with a precision rarely seen in a commercial project (see "God is in the Details," p. 126). "I wanted to achieve the effect of seeing walls without roofs that you see in ruins rising from the countryside in Italy," Piano says.

The three large exhibition bays—each 16 feet high, 32 feet wide, and 120 feet long—are aligned according to the mathematical principles of the Golden Measure, inviting people from the street into a familiar classical form. But the transparent roof and the strict geometry of the garden open the classical lines of the Nasher to the undifferentiated modernist flow of space in works by Mies van der Rohe. Piano and Walker have created not only a superb showcase for the $400 million collection, but also a treatise on the experience of space that is an equal to the art. The two men have proposed a situation that takes everything we know about space going back to Greek temples and turns it into a new experience.

Standing on the terrace that faces Woodall Rodgers Freeway, looking out over the garden, visitors will have the impression that they are seeing the sky through a telescope. The sensation is caused by precisely planted rows of live oaks. As the eye moves from the tops of the trees to the sky, the brain registers a Cartesian expanse of indefinite space that was perfected in André Le Nôtre's 17th-century design for the gardens at the Palace of Versailles. Water gurgling through pools muffles the rush of cars on the freeway below, and the traffic on the access road is blocked from view by a landscaped berm that houses a Skyspace—a windowless room in which viewers look up to the sky through an opening in the ceiling—by artist James Turrell. Due to the disorienting configuration of the room, the sky appears to recede into the ether.

To use a phrase from the '60s, the entire Nasher Sculpture Center is simply a mind-blowing experience.

THE CLIENT
The Nasher home in North Dallas rests in a tree-shaded, 8-acre parcel at the end of a winding driveway. The low-slung, glass-walled house, designed in 1950 by Howard Meyer, a Dallas architect who was influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, is hard to miss. Enormous sculptures mark the approach, like totems of an older and more mature culture. A large, black shape visible in a clearing through a grove of live oaks looks like a question mark on its side attempting to pull itself off the ground. Brightly colored symbols of what could be deities for a pantheistic sect are seen through the woods.

"They are all my favorites," he says as he greets me at the entrance of the house. A trim, compact, tightly coiled man with a lively, engaged face, he is dressed in a bespoke Glenn Plaid suit, with a red Hermès tie and matching pocket-square. He is as exacting sartorially as in every other aspect of his life. Every time we meet, he appears to have just been dressed by a valet.

Here is Raymond D. Nasher, the driving force (and deep pockets) behind the Nasher Sculpture Center. He is a relatively low-key real estate developer best known as the proprietor of NorthPark Center. The 82-year-old Nasher is a special breed of Texan, like the late Stanley Marcus, dedicated to the Nietzschean proposition that beauty can redeem the human spirit. As a shopping-mall developer, Nasher could be seen as one of the spoilers of the American landscape since World War II, but he has demonstrated painstaking attention to detail and concern for the consequences of his actions that are rare among businessmen.

Arguably, since the '60s, downtown Dallas, as a destination for anyone but the workers who fill its glass boxes from 9 to 5, has languished. The Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, designed by I.M. Pei and opened in 1989, was an important step toward revitalization, but now the Nasher Sculpture Center sits at the fulcrum of a movement to bring even more people back. Plans are underway in the Dallas Arts District for a theater by Rem Koolhaas and an opera house by Norman Foster. There is talk of a natural history museum by Frank Gehry. And Nasher, whose shopping mall contributed to the decline of downtown, now emerges as a leader of a renaissance of his beloved, adopted city.

With the light step of a former champion tennis player, Nasher guides me down a hall, past Pablo Picasso's The Pregnant Woman and Constantin Brancusi's The Kiss, to a small library that overlooks a garden and more sculpture. A rectangular hole in the center of Barbara Hepworth's life-size Squares with Two Circles frames a view of a wooded ravine. Next to it stands a cubist concrete stone figure that turns out to be Tete de Femme (Head of a Woman) by Picasso.

"I think those two really talk to each other," Nasher says, pointing to the sculptures as we sit across from each other at a gaming table, under a kinetic red, black, and white mobile by Alexander Calder.

In many ways, Nasher is an improbable leader of a Dallas renaissance. He views his building, which cost him $70 million, as a personal gift to the city. He tells me that he didn't intend to breathe new life into downtown, although he is happy that the Dallas Arts District has benefited from his gift. A pragmatist in the William James sense of the term, the downtown location seemed as logical to him for the sculpture center as the 40 acres of cotton fields were for NorthPark in the 1960s. Nasher won't be drawn into a detailed conversation about the value of the sculpture center to the city vis-à-vis NorthPark. "That was then, and this is now," he says.

There exists not a trace of Texas in his accent, which retains the crisp, staccato, businesslike tones of Boston, where he was born on October 26, 1921. The only child of émigrés from Eastern Europe, Nasher was raised in an atmosphere of civic-mindedness. Although the Nashers struggled to make money—and lost it all in the Depression—his parents regularly took Nasher to art exhibits in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. They spent Saturday nights at the symphony. And when the family relocated to New York City, Nasher took music lessons at the Juilliard School. "Without art, all I would have known was the street," Nasher says.

With degrees in economics from Duke University and Boston University, Nasher moved to Dallas in 1951 for two reasons. The year before, he'd married a woman named Patsy Rabinowitz, whom he'd met while she was a student at Smith College. Patsy was from Dallas, and her family was in the real estate business. The other reason Nasher chose Dallas was that he believed the city was poised to benefit from the postwar building boom.

Nasher's move paid off. And as soon as he made money, he appears to have remembered what his parents had taught him during all those cultural excursions. 'Remember to give back what you receive,' Nasher says they told him. He began donating large sums to worthwhile causes and became active in civic life. He raised money for Democratic political candidates and eventually became a regular visitor to the Kennedy White House. He was at a Trade Mart luncheon waiting for the president to arrive on November 22, 1963. That night, the Nashers opened their house to a group of concerned citizens to discuss the future of Dallas. "We went to churches and spoke to people about the assassination," he recalls. "There was a great deal of understandable fear and divisiveness in the community."

An early sponsor of low-income housing, Nasher served on the Kaiser Commission during the Johnson administration, which looked into the nation's cities at a time when they were consumed by race riots. He was a representative to UNESCO, which met regularly at the United Nations headquarters in New York City, where the Nashers kept an apartment. He taught education at Harvard University. He currently sits on the President's Council for the Arts.

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Through it all, Nasher became perhaps better known in New York, Washington, and Boston than in his hometown of Dallas, where his only commercial development was a mall off Central Expressway. I asked Nasher for a list of associates to contact for this story. The late Stanley Marcus, who was at the Nasher home for dinner two nights before he died in 2002, would have been the only Dallas name.

The mall, of course, was NorthPark. It opened in 1965 as the ne plus ultra of retail shopping experiences. Kevin Roche of the Eero Saarinen architectural firm in New York City designed the master plan (the same firm that did the landmark TWA Terminal at JFK Airport in New York City). Landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, who was dean of the department of landscape architecture at Harvard, planned the gardens. NorthPark was laid out on an axis like a town and was everything you hope a mall will be: bright, airy, unpretentious, easy to negotiate. It does, however, communicate that it's a little more important than an average mall, both with the simplicity of its clean, open forms and with its sculpture collection.

In speeches to business groups, he points out that "more people are exposed to art in NorthPark in a month than in a year in the Dallas Museum of Art." And he believes people return to NorthPark because they have an experience that is "life affirming" (which doesn't mean that they don't also need to pick up a tube of lipstick at Neiman Marcus). There are no statistics to prove that people went to NorthPark just to see Hammering Man, the Jonathan Borofsky sculpture, which until being moved to the Nasher, greeted visitors at the entrance near Lord & Taylor. But Nasher conducts his own research by eavesdropping on shoppers as they look at the art.

"Sometimes they say, 'Look at that. It is awful,'" he says. "And sometimes they say, 'Well, there is something to it.' But, in any event, they seem to talk about the art."

The Nasher collection began modestly with a few pieces of pre-Colombian terra cotta pottery purchased on a family vacation to Mexico. Nasher stands up and pulls one of them from a shelf. "It all comes out of this," he says, cradling the ancient piece in a palm as if it were a delicate, newborn kitten. "The modern sculpture we collected has its genesis in the abstract forms of the Olmec and Mayan cultures." He pulls out a table-size mask by Julio Gonzales that is its own form but refers to ancient pottery. Then he pulls out a small David Smith head and points to the Picasso in the garden and shows how Picasso comes from Smith, who comes from Gonzales via pre-Colombians, making adept links between them like the well-versed art connoisseur he is.

It is one thing to collect table sculpture. It is quite another to acquire 100,000-pound, rolled-steel sculptures like the Richard Serra that once stood in front of the Dallas Museum of Art and now has a home in the sculpture center's garden. The Nasher collection went from a few vacation souvenirs to a major art collection in only a couple of years, thanks largely, it would seem, to the concerted effort of Patsy Nasher, who was an equal partner in the collection before her death in 1988. "Ray and I are by art possessed," Patsy once said.

"We collected things that meant something to us personally, things that gave us butterflies," Nasher tells me. "It was always our personal collection that we wanted to share with others." He bristles at the intimation that the collection was formed to furnish NorthPark, which featured large sculptures by Henry Moore and Picasso when it opened. Although he does acknowledge that his business affected his and Patsy's choice of artistic medium. "Sculpture is much more meaningful [than painting] to the outside of buildings and lobbies," he says.

And those buildings can be meaningful to the sculpture, as the Nashers discovered in 1987, when a major exhibition of more than 100 of their pieces originated at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (and eventually traveled to the Dallas Museum of Art). In the catalog essay that accompanied the exhibition, J. Carter Brown, the director of the National Gallery, said that the collection "vibrates with the Nashers' sense of excellence and historical importance." Seeing their sculpture in the nation's preeminent museum of art prompted the Nashers to donate their collection to an institution.

Patsy's death of cancer the following year made the process an arduous one for Nasher. With his typical dedication to detail, he thoroughly explored the options for the collection, which included the possibility of building a gallery in Washington, Paris, London, or New York as an adjunct to one of the world's great museums. This would have elevated Nasher's stock in international art-collecting circles. But with Patsy gone, Nasher was ready to stay home. Andrea, one of Nasher's three daughters, returned from her more youthful peregrinations to help her father with the center. Like Emperor Shah Jahan, who in the 17th century built the Taj Mahal as a monument to his beloved wife, Empress Mumtaz Mahal, Nasher set out to build the most perfect structure in the world for the viewing of the sculpture that he and his wife had collected. It would serve as an unofficial memorial for Patsy. "Everything was for the art," he says.

During two and a half years of construction, Nasher visited the site at least once a week. With his elegant suits and hard hat, "Mr. Nasher" became a reassuring presence. He reminded the workers in impromptu talks that they were helping to create one of the most important structures in the history of art. His enthusiasm was infectious. "I like to think of this as Apollo 13, where somebody says, 'We could have done it better,'" one construction manager says. "And Tom Hanks says, 'Well, let's do it.'"

The project was small enough for Nasher to manage most of the details on his own and large enough to contain his expansive imagination. "There were times when it seemed that every screw came under his scrutiny," says Vel Hawes, Nasher's onsite representative. Nasher even turned down an offer from the City of Dallas to finance the center, because he didn't believe the city would be able to maintain his rigorous commitment to aesthetics. For instance, where even the architect's plans initially called for tile on the bathroom walls to save money, Nasher insisted on the same travertine as was used in the exhibition bays.

THE ARCHITECT
Renzo Piano is sitting in a restaurant in New York City, talking about his relationship with Ray Nasher. "You need a good architect to build a good building, but you also need a good client," he says. It is a sunny spring day, and the tulips in the small park across the street are blooming. Piano, whose Renzo Piano Building Workshop is based in Genoa, Italy (with a satellite office in Paris), has come to New York to work out his master plan for Columbia University. The Columbia project led him to walk in the rain earlier in the day the same way he walked around downtown Dallas five years before. In spite of his physical and professional stature, he is appealingly modest.

There are clients for architecture who let the architect work with a free rein, and then there are clients who use the whip, urging the architect to give them even more. Nasher admits he's in the latter camp.

His temperament made him a natural client for Piano, who is arguably the world's greatest modernist architect. His buildings are generally considered by his peers to achieve a timeless perfection. There are, of course, detractors who begrudge his reputation and his ethical approach to design, but he refuses to be drawn into the fray. He's not a fighter; he's too busy to fight. The dozen or more projects his firm currently has on the drawing board include a design for the tallest building in Europe, which is to rise more than 1,000 feet above the Thames River in London; the glass-walled, 52-story New York Times headquarters; and an addition to Atlanta's High Museum of Art.

The first time Nasher described his project to Piano—a sculpture garden in downtown Dallas abutting a freeway—the architect told people, "Ray Nasher is crazy." Nasher took that as a challenge and sent Piano a ticket to come to Dallas and spend five days walking the site. In the New York restaurant, Piano takes up a pencil in his enormous hand and draws thick lines on a piece of paper. He illustrates the slope of the Nasher site as you walk from Flora Street to Woodall Rodgers. It's not a slope you would normally notice.

"The slight curve of a chain strung between two poles," Piano says, "it's known as a catenary." He pronounces the word with relish. "Techne is in my skin. I don't think of the general and then the particular. I didn't think, 'Here is a site,' and then think, 'I am going to use travertine marble.' When I was walking the site, I thought of travertine at the same time as I thought of people passing through the site on their way from their cars. After more than 40 years of architecture, I feel like a master violinist who knows how to play the instrument with his eyes closed."

Piano thinks that his biggest achievement in Dallas is to give the city a memory. This slightly submerged, travertine-walled, invisible-roofed gallery and garden will function, he predicts, as a collective memory that will trigger something ineffable. "No one knows the way memory works," he says. "But without memory, we would die."

Piano's memory began in 1937 on the Mediterranean coast of Italy in the tiny hilltop village of Pegli. "Going up to Genoa was a pilgrimage," he says. "When speaking about Genoa, I speak about a historic center. I have always been deeply attracted to historic centers." This, of course, explains his sensitivity to Dallas' historic center.

Although Piano is a graduate of the Architectural Association in London, a hotbed of theoretical innovation that helped spawn the talents of Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas, he retains an almost nerdy fondness for the builder side of architecture. In fact, he comes from a long line of builders. Aware of his legacy, he speaks glowingly of the tools of architecture that were invented by Filippo Brunelleschi, the 16th-century architect who altered the appearance of Florence with mathematically precise domes; of R. Buckminster Fuller, the Boston architect whose geodesic dome set out to free the 20th century of the orthogonal line; of Charles Eames, a Southern California architect whose study of the human body led to one of the world's most ergonomic chairs.

Many critics maintain that Piano's first truly great building was the Menil Collection in Houston, a small, nondescript gallery on a quiet residential street, which was completed in 1986. The Menil Collection introduced a grade of natural light never before seen in the interior of a building, a feat even more amazing considering the thermal demands of a subtropical climate. As with the Nasher Sculpture Center, Piano invented the roofing that controls the light, which in the case of the Menil consisted of a series of concrete leaves that work as baffles. If you look at the Menil and then the Galerie Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, which Piano completed in 1997, and then the Nasher Sculpture Center, you can see that he has improved on the roofing and lighting systems. And the roofing systems have become a lighter and less obvious part of the structure. The proportions of the galleries also have grown, from 14-by-28 to 15-by-30 and now 16-by-32. The Nasher, with its revolutionary membrane of north-facing occuli, is the most outstanding of the three structures.

Nasher, who met Piano at the opening of the Galerie Beyeler, maintains that Piano wanted to repeat the design of the Beyeler in the sculpture center, but Nasher pushed the architect to develop the concept further. Piano was up to the challenge. He is a purist who breathes Plato when he says that he wants to put together buildings "the way a shoemaker builds shoes," and he is known for an attention to detail that borders on maniacal. There is a reason he calls his firm Renzo Piano Building Workshop. Before most designs leave the office, full-scale models are erected and tested, an extremely thorough and unusual approach to architecture. The Nasher was designed this way, accounting for a half million dollars of the project's $70 million price tag.

The sunscreen and glass roof were tested in a full-size mock-up in Turin, Italy. The parts for a great deal of the building were manufactured under Piano's supervision in Europe and arrived in Dallas with detailed instructions and, in some cases, a team of European installers. At one of the meetings in Dallas, a Piano associate was shown a wind detector that would have to be installed on the outside of the building to electronically open the outside shades when a fierce wind kicks up. It was an ungainly little unit with a plastic, faux wood case. After asking if the unit was necessary and receiving assurances that it was, the associate took the case apart and redesigned the wind detector with a sleek chrome case while the meeting was still underway.

Even the stone walls were designed and engineered in Italy by Piano's office. "I can duplicate the appearance of a hand-cut stone wall with modern technology by highlighting the imperfections in the stones," Piano says. "You see the trace of hand where there is no hand."

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THE PLACE
Workmen are still installing the final sections of the sunscreen and white oak floor, but the building is nearly complete on the July day that I meet Ray Nasher and his daughter Andrea on the site. We walk through the gallery to a terrace that overlooks rows of trees in the garden. The temperature is approaching 100 degrees, but Nasher keeps his suit coat buttoned, despite Andrea's protestations.

Surveying the grounds, Nasher waves a hand over his property and says rather perfunctorily, "A gallery, a terrace, and a garden for the sculpture." That's it. Nothing more. But looking up at the sky, he admits that he feels the presence of Patsy in the gallery and garden.

We move inside to get out of the sun. While workmen clean up, Nasher sits on a stack of building material. He points to one of the interior walls and says with unabashed pride: "That is the most beautiful wall in the world." As he said he could, Piano has used a laser to make the stone appear as if it were hand-cut. Nasher is right. The wall is a work of art that would provide a perfect foil for Alexander Calder's massive Spider. I walk with the Nashers out of the building and down Flora to Harwood, the same walk that Piano took when the police stopped him.

In his book The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade presented a religious belief that all space in the universe is essentially profane or nonreligious. But he goes on to say that when the sacred expresses itself through architecture, it breaks the homogeneity of profane space, which in turn reveals an absolute reality to people.

Dallas will enter a new absolute reality with the opening of the Nasher Sculpture Center. Pedestrians will now have a destination in the center of the city that rewards their efforts with a release from the world—a classic definition of sacred. And while Dallas will never be 19th-century Paris, the Nasher will take visitors to a time and a place—a dream, really—where the light is perfect and everything looks beautiful. Not a small asset for a city to possess.


Jeffrey Hogrefe directs the writing program for the School of Architecture at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.

GOD IS IN THE DETAILS
How to drain water off a flat, glass roof and other technical marvels of the Nasher Sculpture Center.

One of the workers on the Nasher Sculpture Center neatly summed up the delicate process of constructing this special building thusly: "We learned that you can't make a Swiss watch with a hammer."

It would be difficult to find another structure that was put together with such exacting attention to detail. There is, in fact, no other building quite like it in the world. From the roof to the walls—each part was engineered to fit the next with precious little tolerance for wiggle room. Because most of the parts were without precedent, prototypes were built and tested in labs all over the world before they arrived in Dallas. Teams of installers accompanied the parts from Europe to work alongside the Texans who had already received lectures on the importance of the structure by Nasher himself. Signs were posted advising the workmen to handle all of the parts with caution. The job site became an international meeting place of men and women who were dedicated to doing the best work they could—an attitude many of the workers told me they had never before encountered.

In his design for the Nasher Sculpture Center, architect Renzo Piano emphasized that he wanted the lightest possible roof and the heaviest walls. He wasn't sure exactly how to achieve this, but he knew that he wanted a flat, glass roof and thick, travertine-clad walls. The first problem was structural. Normally a building is held together by the weight of its roof, through what's known as compression. In this case, the structure would have to be held together by its walls. Ultimately, Piano devised a unique system of rods and ties that spread the tension from the walls through the structure.

FINE TUNING
Each of the six massive walls in the sculpture center began as a hollow frame of structural steel. The travertine went on later. Mark Wamble, a Houston-based architect who was Piano's Texas contact, compared the process of tightening the rods connecting the walls to tuning a guitar with a rubber neck. As one rod was tightened, a wall would lean in that direction; then, as an opposing rod was tightened, the wall would straighten out. On a normal job, structural steel is given a three-quarter-inch tolerance. On the Nasher, the tolerance was zero. Everything had to plumb perfectly, or it was redone until it met the rigid specifications. Some of the walls were realigned five, sometimes six, times before they were deemed adequate.

Once the walls were in place, the roof panels were lowered onto the structure. The roof panels were made up of sandwiches of 3-inch-thick safety glass coated with a film that repels ultraviolet rays. Each measured 4 feet by 16 feet and weighed 1,200 pounds. A large crane lifted each panel through a network of suction cups. Teams of four installed the sections in a process directed by a radio dispatcher. Again, the glass roof panels had to be perfectly plumb, because they would additionally have to support the weight of a human being.

WATER WORKS
The flatness of the roof called for another feat of engineering. Rainwater tends to pool on flat roofs, and on the Nasher this would have been unacceptable. Together with an engineering firm in London, Piano designed a drainage system that forces the water into long drains in the walls themselves and down into storm gutters under the building. The drains—16-foot-long vertical channels—were tested in a mock-up outside Dallas with high-powered sprinklers of the sort normally used to put out fires in skyscrapers. Engineers figured that to be safe, the drains needed to handle rainfall at 7.5 inches per hour (because a hurricane could produce 3 to 4 inches of rain per hour). As a backup, the drains were designed with three separate channels in the events of blockage caused be debris. Ultimately, in the test the drains swallowed water at a rate of 16 inches per hour.

The last section that was installed is perhaps the most ingenuous. It took 10 passes to perfect the sunscreen, a super-thin aluminum membrane of millions of tiny eyes that fits over the glass roof on an independent system of hardware. In a laboratory outside London, the solar conditions of the site were duplicated with a computer program that simulated the arc of the sun through the sky at the site's exact longitude and latitude over a 365-day period. The goal was to produce a thin screen that would block all direct rays from the sun every day of the year. Once Piano and the London engineers perfected the screen, Nasher applied for a U.S. patent—not to cash in on the invention, but to ensure that those who tried to duplicate it followed the same strict guidelines they had already established.

HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW?
Such a building would look foolish surrounded by saplings. So how do you plant a garden that looks as if it has been in the ground for 25 years? The grass was the easy part. You buy rolls of a special grade of sod that is green all year. And to solve the problem of soggy grass after one of those summer downpours, you lay the grass over a layer of webbing that wicks away moisture. Some NFL stadiums use the same system. But no NFL field has trees with mature roots growing in it. The landscapers invented a special grade of soil to take up the slack between the roots and the webbing.

The hard part was the trees. Four major species of mature trees, 174 in total, were planted in the Nasher: live oaks, burr oaks, cedar elms, and magnolias. To find trees that are fully grown, the landscape architect hired a tree agent who scoured ranches willing to part with their trees. And not only did they have to find mature trees, but they also had to find groups of trees that were all the same size. Particularly important were the live oaks, which were planted in a straight line on an axis with the rear façade of the building. It meant in some cases paying $25,000 for a single tree. With their 15-foot root balls, they were transported on flatbed trucks.

Planting them was a chore, too. Just as the gallery allowed for no tolerance in its construction, the garden plan called for a rigid geometry determined by a surveyor's measure. One night near quitting time, it was discovered that the grove of cedar elms was slightly misaligned. Workers stayed late, and each tree was picked up, tweaked, and lowered back into its hole.

The burr oaks, which were planted in front of the building, were particularly difficult to locate. A team that included Andrea Nasher spent several days flying to ranches in a helicopter to find six trees that were all the same size. It was worth the trouble. The burr oak, Andrea rhapsodizes, "has a large leaf that's shaped like a Matisse cutout and the most perfect acorn of any oak. — J.H.

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You can read the D Magazine article on the internet but I encourage you to buy a copy to see some the excellent photography of the center. That is my plug!

After reading this article from D Magazine (and others), I am really starting to believe that the Nasher will attract the attention from artists, architects, critics, and visitors from everywhere. This is a monumental and very personal gift to the city and Dallas will be forever beholden to Nasher's decision to put it here.

[evdallas]

We are very lucky to have this in our city. I hope it serves as a catalyst for development as Piano envisions. I wish we ahd more people like ray Nasher in this city.

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Deep in The Art Of Texas
Dallas gets the ideal home for a great collection
By Cathleen McGuigan - NEWSWEEK
http://www.msnbc.com/news/976016.asp?0dm=s12Bk

Oct. 13 issue — Back in the spring of 1999, Dallas real-estate developer Ray Nasher paid a visit to the Italian architect Renzo Piano at Piano’s spectacular studio high above the Mediterranean outside Genoa. With his late wife, Patsy, Nasher had assembled what is arguably the greatest collection of modern sculpture in private hands: 350 indoor and outdoor pieces by the likes of Rodin and Giacometti, Picasso and Matisse, Henry Moore and Joan Miro.

MUSEUMS HAD SHAMELESSLY courted him for his legacy—the National Gallery in Washington was one suitor, as were the Guggenheim in New York and the Dallas Museum of Art—but in the end, Nasher decided to build his own space. By that spring, Piano —had begun to plot out a private urban garden and small museum. A simple project, it would seem—glass and travertine, grass and trees, a backdrop for great art.

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.

[bloodandpopcorn]

Wow, excellent article! Nice national coverage for the Nasher. Hopefully this will bring in some people to enjoy it! I still think that the Nasher may help Dallas in ways none of us can yet imagine.

[gc]

Pursuit of high art
an art in itself
20 years of quiet courting passed before Nasher decided on Dallas
10:44 PM CDT on Monday, October 13, 2003
By VICTORIA LOE HICKS / The Dallas Morning News
http://www.dallasnews.com/latestnews/stories/101403dnmetgenesis.2cd79.html

Some courtships take longer than others.

The one that will be consummated Monday with the public opening of the Nasher Sculpture Center spanned the better part of two decades.

Like the courtship practices of European royal houses, the wooing of art collectors of Raymond Nasher's stature is an elaborate, highly stylized diplomatic rite.

It requires patience, a keen eye and a cool head – not unlike the qualities required of a person who makes good in the real estate business, which Mr. Nasher emphatically did.

"Ray is a very, very, very, very experienced developer," said Jay Gates, former director of the Dallas Museum of Art.

Over the years, the likes of New York's Guggenheim Museum and Washington's National Gallery of Art – in addition to the DMA – queued up to show Mr. Nasher's collection, print handsome catalogs of the works, and appoint him to their boards.

So virtually everyone was stunned when he announced in 1997 that he would personally finance creation of a center in downtown Dallas to be the collection's permanent home.

Although the Dallas museum will not own the works – valued at $400 million – the collection will live next door. In essence, the museum gained the advantages of a permanent liaison without the burdens of care and upkeep.

The center, estimated to cost upwards of $70 million, will include indoor and outdoor galleries, plus facilities for scholarship and conservation.

"It was beyond my wildest dreams," said Deedie Rose, who as president of the museum's board in 1997 was among those anxiously awaiting Mr. Nasher's response to the city's offer to raise $15.6 million to build a sculpture garden.

Until the day she was summoned to meet with Mr. Nasher and his daughter Nancy in Mr. Gates' office, Ms. Rose said, "I lived in constant trepidation."

By that point, some onlookers had begun to suspect that Mr. Nasher enjoyed the delights of courtship too much to abandon them for the responsibilities of marriage.

Alpha and omega


The dance that ended in Dallas also began in Dallas.
In 1987, the DMA organized an exhibit of works from the collection of Mr. Nasher and his wife, Patsy. The museum also arranged for the works to go on tour to the National Gallery and then to venues in Madrid, Florence and Tel Aviv.

The tour brought instant notice and acclaim.

"There are rumors that several museums would love to be the eventual home of the collection," Architectural Digest reported.

And even Dallas partisans were forced to admit that the Nasher pieces looked better than good in the I.M. Pei-designed East Building of the National Gallery. Situated on a direct line between the White House and the Capitol, the gallery draws millions of visitors a year.

"It was very, very exciting," Mr. Nasher said.

Before you can say "carpetbagger," J. Carter Brown, the high-wattage director of the National Gallery, began beating a path to Dallas. At one point, he showed Mr. Nasher a model for a new sculpture garden on the National Mall.

Mr. Brown was diligently working to expand his institution's holdings in 20th-century art, never one of its strong suits. The Nasher collection – acknowledged as the most authoritative survey of modern sculpture in private hands – would have moved the ball far downfield.

"Carter Brown became very interested in putting our collection at the National Gallery," Mr. Nasher said. "We had many, many conversations."

Meanwhile, the Nashers developed ties to London's Tate Gallery through sculptor Henry Moore, whose work they collected with fervor. And they established an enduring friendship with Swiss gallery owners Ernst and Hildy Beyeler, who had embarked on their own serious collecting career. Through the Beyelers, the Nashers met international art stars such as Miro, Chagall and Dubuffet.

Pieces are sold


Patsy Nasher died in 1988. Three years later, Mr. Nasher did something the couple had not done since they began collecting major sculptural works in the early 1960s: He sold four of the choicest pieces to the Hall Foundation of Kansas City, Mo., which loaned them permanently to that city's art museum.
That set off a fresh round of jitters in Dallas, which only intensified as an even more formidable competitor took center stage. Thomas Krens, the director who has spread the Guggenheim's modern art franchise across the globe, swept Mr. Nasher into its heady orbit.

Mr. Krens invited Mr. Nasher to help design an expanded sculpture garden at the museum's Venice outpost – renamed for the Nashers – and to exhibit works there. The Guggenheim also appointed Mr. Nasher to the building committee for its Frank Gehry-designed museum in Bilbao, Spain, which became the overnight sensation of the art world.

In contrast to the National Gallery, the Guggenheim is pre-eminently a repository for modern art, although its holdings lean more to painting than sculpture. It had the fit and it had the international reach.

"Tom Krens was very, very interested," Mr. Nasher said. "We had to think about it."

In 1996, the Guggenheim and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco organized a major exhibit of works from the Nasher collection, which traveled first to San Francisco and then to New York. Instrumental in that effort were former DMA officials Harry Parker and Steven Nash, both longtime friends and advisers to Mr. Nasher who had landed in San Francisco.

The Guggenheim even unshuttered the skylights in its Frank Lloyd Wright-designed museum – usually shrouded to protect the paintings – and Mr. Nasher basked in the light, which was matched by the glowing critical response.

Mr. Krens was in Europe last week and unavailable for comment. Anthony Calnek, the museum's deputy director for communications, said the Guggenheim never expected to receive a bequest as a result of the show.

The high-stakes chess games between major museums and major collectors are "subtle matters," he said. "The '97 show was an end unto itself for a museum like ours."

Dallas steps up to it


At that point, though, many observers might have bet on the Guggenheim.
However, they probably wouldn't have known about the hush-hush but intense campaign being waged in Dallas.

At the center of that campaign were not just Ms. Rose, Mr. Gates and DMA board member and longtime Nasher family friend Jeremy Halbreich, but City Manager John Ware, Assistant City Manager Mary Suhm and Mayor Ron Kirk.

They worked deliberately but with a sense of urgency.

"We were running scared or working scared, which is a smart way to work," Mr. Halbreich said.

Within a month of being named city manager in 1993, Mr. Ware paid a visit to Mr. Nasher. In that first meeting, which took place at Mr. Nasher's office, he didn't broach the subject of the collection, Mr. Ware said: "I just wanted to get to know him."

Their second meeting took place over Sunday brunch at Mr. Nasher's house. After the meal, they toured the house and garden, which were specifically designed to showcase the art.

"As we walked, I would identify each piece and tell him the artist," Mr. Ware said. "I think that might have been the linchpin of our relationship."

Mr. Nasher would have liked to leave the art in place, converting the house and garden into a museum. The first task for Mr. Ware and other Dallas officials was to persuade him, as gently as possible, that the residential setting made that impossible.

When Mr. Kirk was elected in 1995, Mr. Ware wasted no time in impressing upon him the importance of landing the Nasher collection. Unbeknownst to the City Council, they began calculating how much money the city could reasonably promise to raise to build a sculpture garden.

In concert with the museum's representatives, they also began discussing with Mr. Nasher the host of issues such a proposal entails. They talked sites, they talked architects, they talked tax implications, they talked maintenance – and they talked and talked and talked parking.

What they never discussed was the possibility that Mr. Nasher might build and pay for the center himself, rather than donating the collection to the DMA. That notion, Ms. Rose said, would have run counter to everything Mr. Nasher had been hearing for years from his bevy of suitors.

"Throughout the courtship process he heard: 'Here's what I want to do for you, if you'll give us part of your collection,' " she said.

Build-it-yourself route


The Beyelers, by contrast, had chosen the build-it-yourself route. In 1997, they opened the Beyeler Foundation Museum near Basel, Switzerland, designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, whom Mr. Nasher met at the Beyeler's opening and later hired.
With the cream of the Nasher collection already in San Francisco and headed to New York, Dallas made its formal pitch.

"We had colored drawings. We made a big presentation," Ms. Rose said.

There were only two things wrong with it:

The $15.6 million, though a respectable sum, would build only a garden, not the center for scholarship and conservation that Mr. Nasher envisioned.

In common with every other museum's bid, it would mean his giving up ownership – and control – of the collection.

"It was very hard for Ray to think about turning it over to anybody else," Mr. Halbreich said.

Mr. Nasher also appeared dismayed, Ms. Rose said, by the prospect of "design by committee."

As a veteran of several Dallas projects, including NorthPark mall, Mr. Nasher knew the ways of City Hall. He had only recently won a decades-long fight over the rezoning of the Caruth homestead across from NorthPark (a victory some attributed to the council's eagerness to snag the collection).

To compound Mr. Nasher's doubts, Mr. Ware cautioned him against relying on the city to maintain the art.

"I said, 'Ray, that's not a good idea.' " Mr. Ware said. " 'If, in the next budget year, we're having budget problems, maintenance is one of the first things I'll look to cut.' "

Over and against those drawbacks was the city's ability to put together the land.

And then there was Dallas' ace in the hole: hometown pride.

"I just begged," Mr. Kirk said. "I pleaded. I knew that if we got into a bidding war, the city was not going to win. It was just a flagrant appeal to Ray's ego and sense of civic pride – which I do pretty good at."

Whatever his feelings, for once Mr. Nasher couldn't deliberate at his leisure. The city gave him a deadline. If he did not accept the deal by a certain date, the offer would be withdrawn.

About that time, the New York Times wrote a story describing the competition for the collection. In it, Mr. Nasher came off as coy – a portrayal that seemed, to some friends, to distress him.

Several observers suspect that it was Nancy Nasher who found the solution, suggesting to her father that he retain ownership of the art and fund the project himself through the Nasher Foundation.

"I just think he realized that was best to serve the art," Ms. Rose said. "It was the right thing."

E-mail vloe@dallasnews.com

[gc]

I found this today on D Magazine's blog....



THE WORLD WILL BE COMING TO DALLAS
Last night was the private opening of the Nasher. The public opening is Monday. I have one word of advice: go. Others will judge over time how this museum ranks among the world's best, but there is no doubt that it ranks high. Even crowded with people, it provides an irenic, contemplative, almost sacred space in which the visitor and the works enter into a relationship unlike any I have experienced outside the great cathedrals of Europe. Like a master architect of the Middle Ages, Ray Nasher conceived and built this space without committees, without compromise, and without regard to cost. If you haven't read Jeffrey Hogrefe's piece about Nasher, "The Gift," in the October issue of D Magazine, be sure you do before you go. I'm re-reading it now.

Wick Allison · 09:13 AM

[Columbus Civil]

I'm taking my parents there next weekend -- can't wait!

i·ren·ic ( P ) Pronunciation Key (-rnk, -rnk) also i·ren·i·cal (--kl, -n-kl)
adj.
Promoting peace; conciliatory.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Greek eirnikos, from eirn, peace.]

[boozo]

Here are some great pics from the inside on the sculpture!

http://www.dallasartsrevue.com/

[gc]

Art behind the art
Architect Piano creates a precise blend of light, texture and mood
http://www.dallasnews.com/latestnews/stories/101903dnentnasherarch.84289.html
10:04 PM CDT on Saturday, October 18, 2003
By DAVID DILLON / The Dallas Morning News

Italians have a word for it – sprezzatura – the art that conceals art. It's what Renaissance courtiers were expected to display in public, an effortless grace that subsumes sweat and strain in exquisite form. It's what the Nasher Sculpture Center is about as well.

The museum and the garden are both stunning exercises in concealment. The travertine walls of the galleries are crammed with ducts and cables and sophisticated electronic gear, but only pristine surfaces show. The architects didn't want drains and catch basins in the garden, so they built up layers of "designer dirt" to take care of the runoff. Even the loading dock is hidden, as though deliveries and trash collection were of purely hypothetical concern.

Developer and philanthropist Raymond Nasher says he chose Renzo Piano because he is a builder who understands materials and because of all the architects he interviewed, Mr. Piano understands art the best. His relationship to Mr. Piano is that of a patron, a Texas Medici, rather than a conventional client. Clients get buildings; patrons get architecture. Mr. Nasher got architecture.

The $70 million center, a gift to the city, is a refined synthesis of art, architecture and engineering in which bold form gives way to the pleasures of light, texture and mood. It shows the Pritzker Architecture Prize winner at his most self-effacing, a building of lapidary precision in which every detail – from the arc of the vaults to the joints of the stone and the frames of the doors – has been thought through to the last millimeter.

Mr. Piano even carries a tape measure in his pocket so that he can instantly recalculate the width of a rib or the shape of a turnbuckle. Workers tremble whenever he pulls it out, knowing that another change order is on the way. "He never stops designing," one of them said wearily. Mr. Piano's tolerances range from impossible to nonexistent, yet in a building defined by the gradual accumulation of small sensory pleasures, they couldn't be otherwise.

'Noble ruin'


Mr. Piano also carries around a crumpled photograph of an ancient ruin in Herdonia, Italy, that he says inspired his thinking about the center.
"We wanted to make something that is about the day-to-day life of the city yet is also outside of time," he explains. "It is absurd, really, this idea of a noble ruin in the middle of a busy downtown, but that is what makes it powerful."

On the exterior, the travertine is pitted and weathered, as though it had just come from the quarry, whereas in the galleries it has been polished and mitered like fine cabinetry so as not to upstage the art. Within these serene contemplative spaces, sculptures are set off by white oak floors, pale limestone walls, silvery aluminum and glass. That's the entire tonal range. No bright colors or sharp contrasts, but no bland uniformity either. The walls and floors are subtly veined and streaked, and everything is washed in soft, even light.

Light is the soul of the Nasher center, and the sunscreens its technological high point – straight sections of cast aluminum laid over curved glass that rests on 2-inch steel beams. Not easy to do. This is the level of craftsmanship that Mr. Nasher demanded. He challenged Mr. Piano to come up with something completely new.

Most architects would have opted for a proven solution over an experimental one, but as befits someone from Genoa, Italy, Mr. Piano is an inveterate explorer and adventurer who is always interested in what's just over the technological horizon. He doesn't have a distinctive style, like Frank Gehry or Richard Meier, or even a consistent look. From the Centre Pompidou in Paris to the Tjibaou Cultural Center in New Caledonia, every building has been different.

The sunscreens consist of 4-foot-by-6-inch sections of cast aluminum, topped with oval scoops that allow soft northern light into the galleries. True to Mr. Nasher's instruction, they are smaller and lighter than the ferro-concrete "leaves" in the Menil Collection in Houston and far simpler than the computerized louvers in the neighboring Cy Twombly Gallery or the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, Switzerland. They are only 6 inches thick and contain no moving parts that jam at inopportune moments. They took three years to design and install, causing an international run on Valium, but from all appearances are worth every minute.

From the beginning, Mr. Nasher insisted that the landscape be as important as the building, and as usual he got what he wanted. Peter Walker's garden is as refined in its own way as the galleries, extending their thin travertine walls with tight rows of live oaks and cedar elms. The live oaks occupy the center of the lawn and will gradually spread to form canopies over the walkways. The deciduous cedar elms, which can soar 70 feet, line the edges to allow sunlight to penetrate the garden during the winter.

Like everything else at the center, the garden went through numerous revisions – six at least. Mr. Nasher initially wanted to keep the collection at his home in North Dallas, until he realized that the grounds couldn't accommodate monumental pieces like Mark di Suvero's I-beam Eviva Amore. Yet Mr. Walker's first design played off this romantic domestic setting with groves and mounds and long serpentine borders. It didn't fit the building or the urban setting. Mr. Piano subsequently proposed an apple orchard, which nobody wanted except him.

'Duel of the titans'


In the meantime, the placement of the building kept shifting, from Harwood Street to the edge of Woodall Rodgers Freeway to Flora Street.
"We finally decided to do the simplest thing we could and then complicate it here and there," says Mr. Walker, making the negotiations sound far more amicable than they were.

"It was a duel of the titans," says Vel Hawes, the owner's representative and one of the heroes of the project. "They kept filibustering each other over everything, to the point that we tried not to have the two of them in town at the same time."

In the end, simplicity and urbanity won. A gently sloping path teases from the terrace, through an enfilade of trees, to fountains and reflecting pools at the foot of the garden. As in the galleries, the color register is extremely limited – green to green with nothing flamboyant to compete with the sculpture.

The long, axial views are crisp and formal, but those side-to-side are more episodic and mysterious. From one spot, Roy Lichtenstein's Double Glass is only a spot of color; from another, Jonathan Borofsky's Hammering Man becomes only a head and upraised arm. These intimations are invitations to roam and explore. Unlike most sculpture gardens, the Nasher center is not an art supermarket in which every square foot is claimed. There's room to relax and reflect.

Not even great design is flawless, however. Compared with the rest of the building, the large gallery windows look a bit flat and two-dimensional, as if Mr. Piano had temporarily misplaced his tape measure. A few pockets in the garden, around Jean Dubuffet's Gossiper II, for example, feel overcrowded, something that curatorial fine-tuning should take care of. And the bamboo, beautiful as it is, makes an odd companion for the native plantings elsewhere, as though it had mysteriously migrated from the Crow Collection of Asian Art across the street.

Yet these are minor blemishes in an exemplary project. Dallas is hoping, of course, that the center will finally put it on the international culture map. City officials have visions of limos and tour buses decanting onto Flora Street streams of out-of-town visitors, who will then fan out through the Arts District. Mr. Nasher typically takes the broader view that it's time for Dallas and Fort Worth to collaborate on creating a regional cultural center instead of behaving like dueling frontier outposts.

'So much to see'


"People will now be able to come and spend a weekend or longer because there is so much to see," he says.
The big winners, of course, will be the residents of Dallas.

From one perspective, the center is a refuge from the city, a soft green place in a hard brown environment, where the air seems fresh and the roar of the traffic is temporarily stilled. Yet from another, it represents a heightening and intensification of urban life. The walls of the garden frame and recompose the downtown skyline, making it appear new and surprising. Some buildings look better than they did before or than they really are. This is what architecture is supposed to do – change our perceptions of space and place, make us take a second look.

Standing in the Nasher garden at twilight, as the sun sets and the lights in the surrounding skyscrapers come on, it's hard to remember that five years ago this was a parking lot, that it's still surrounded by parking lots and unrealized dreams. Such moments reaffirm the transforming power of great architecture, and Dallas' deep need for it.

E-mail ddillon@dallasnews.com

[tamtagon]

Mr. Nasher typically takes the broader view that it's time for Dallas and Fort Worth to collaborate on creating a regional cultural center instead of behaving like dueling frontier outposts.

Maybe, before too long, we'll see Dallas sharing some all weather art from it's sculpture garden, and Fort Worth will share some paintings most often seen on the pages of art history books. My friends down at Atlanta's High Museum of Art have been giving me a hard time about the Nasher Sculpture Center, wondering why I havent rambled on and on and on about the 'new big thing in Dallas.' I'm pleased that Nasher's opening is making such a splash to bring about unprompted comments from some disconnected art students/lovers a thousand miles away.

[gc]

In case you have not seen them, the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star Telegram both have wonderful special reports about the Nasher Sculpture Center. After reading the two of these, you may have NSC fatigue....if you do not already!

Anyways, if you get a chance read them. :)

[evdallas]

I noticed the website www.nashersculpturecenter.org is updated, had some nice pictures if you haven't been by yet.

[pariah]

anybody been to nasher yet, i can't wait to get some time:D

[psukhu]

I went on the first day. It was very nice, although it was a bit crowded.

The location ties in well with the Asian Art Museum and the new entrance for the DMA.

The next question is what will go the in parking lot just to the north?

[JaeTex]

I've just seen it as I drive by, but it looks to me like even the parking lot actually looks tons better. I guess it got spruced up for the nasher. Am I seeing things?

[gc]

Jaetex, no you are not seeing things. They have added some things here and there. I am planning on going this weekend sometime....you know when the crowds will be the worst!

[bloodandpopcorn]

I'm going to try and catch it this weekend too. I wanted to go monday, but things just didnt work out. Do they allow cameras, does anyone know?

[psukhu]

Yes, they allow cameras, but no flash.

[mdunlap1]

A New Boast for Dallas

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/11/23/travel/23nasher-span.jpg
Henry Moore's "Working Model for Three Piece No. 3: Vertebrae" (1968) at the Nasher Sculpture Center.


By KATHRYN JONES

Published: November 23, 2003

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/a.gifFTER living in Fort Worth for more than 20 years, I didn't have to think too much until recently about where to take out-of-town visitors - or myself, for that matter - to see the best art in northern Texas.

We always headed straight to Fort Worth's cultural district, home of the Kimbell Art Museum, the Amon Carter Museum and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, reincarnated last year in a stunning new Tadao Ando structure. In a morning or afternoon of museum-hopping, we could see Rembrandts, Cézannes and Picassos at the Kimbell; Remingtons and O'Keeffes at the Amon Carter; and Pollocks, de Koonings and Warhols at the Modern.

But I had to add 30 miles to my art itinerary after the new Nasher Sculpture Center opened Oct. 20 in downtown Dallas.

Driving east on Interstate 30 toward the skyscrapers jutting from the concrete prairie, I tried to recall the last time I went to Dallas to visit a museum, but couldn't. After all, the city is better known for its professional football team and mammoth shopping centers than for fine art.

Come to think of it, the last time I was in Dallas was to shop at the chic NorthPark shopping center developed by the real estate entrepreneur Raymond Nasher, who was one of the first developers to set aside space for art in a commercial project.

He and his wife, Patsy, who died in 1988, spent more than four decades amassing a sculpture collection dating from the 19th century to the contemporary, including works by Calder, Barbara Hepworth, Matisse, Henry Moore, Claes Oldenburg, Picasso and Rodin. They rotated selections from the collection, lilke Jonathan Borofsky's kinetic sculpture "Hammering Man," inside the elegant NorthPark mall and outside on its grounds.

Now the collection has a permanent home in a new $70 million indoor and outdoor museum that is situated where a sea of parking lots once separated the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, designed by I. M. Pei, and the Dallas Museum of Art, now celebrating its centennial. The Nasher Center not only serves as the missing link between the two arts complexes but it also stands on its own as one of the few art institutions dedicated almost exclusively to sculpture.

Dallas held its breath for years to see what Mr. Nasher would do with his collection. Despite being courted by institutions like the Guggenheim, the National Gallery in Washington, the Tate Gallery in London and the Dallas Museum of Art, he decided to keep the collection in Dallas.

To be sure it stayed intact, he would pay for its home himself and build it as he envisioned. After buying the 2.4-acre downtown site, Mr. Nasher commissioned Renzo Piano, the architect of the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Menil Collection in Houston, to design the building.

Finally, Dallas can claim, without the braggadocio the city is famous for, that it too is an art destination. No more playing second fiddle to its smaller rival to the west.

As I strolled through the Nasher's light-filled galleries, this new urban shrine to modern sculpture seemed remarkably understated, unusual in image-conscious Dallas. The museum marries indoors and outdoors quite seamlessly.

It's easy to spend most of a day wandering around the 55,000-square-foot interior with its barrel-vaulted bays of Italian travertine, its glass facades and almost transparent ceiling that uses cast-aluminum sunscreens to block direct sun and keep the light soft. The galleries look out onto the garden, a rectangle of intense green with fountains, reflecting pools and trees planted to form organic spaces for viewing the outdoor sculpture.

The inaugural exhibition, "From Rodin to Calder: Masterworks of Modern Sculpture from the Nasher Collection,'' which runs through Februrary in the luminous, spacious interior galleries, traces the inventive forces that shaped modern sculpture with 70 works by more than 20 artists, including Picasso, Matisse, Giacometti and David Smith. Some of the sculptures including Picasso's "Head of a Woman," a folded sheet-metal sculpture, and several of Giacometti's elongated figures, are paired with paintings by the artists.

Less than a third of the collection of more than 300 sculptures is on view. After the inaugural exhibition ends, other parts of the collection will be displayed on a rotating basis.

ON the warm fall day when I visited, the galleries and garden were brimming with people, but not uncomfortably crowded. Old favorites, like Rodin's plaster cast of "The Age of Bronze," are displayed side by side with less-known works, like Medardo Rosso's exquisite amber-colored, wax-over-plaster busts, including a heartbreaking one called "Sick Child." Also on display were recent acquisitions, like an early figure by Matisse, "The Serf," and, outdoors in the garden, Picasso's first monumental concrete sculpture, also titled "Head of a Woman."

I was intrigued by the collection's sheer range of scale. Giacometti's match-stick-sized figures in gold leaf over bronze ("Two Figurines") were so tiny that a magnifying glass would have been helpful. But Mark di Suvero's "Eviva Amore," a monumental work of steel I-beams that anchors the sculpture garden, prompted me to crane my neck and back up to appreciate its massive scale against the backdrop of the city's geometric skyline.

One of the most haunting works is Magdalena Abakanowicz's "Bronze Crowd," an installation of 36 bronze, headless figures aligned in two long rows. Viewers fell silent when they arrived at this installation. Many walked close to them to better contemplate their eerie, larger-than-life presence. One man somberly commented that they looked like prisoners in a concentration camp.

Richard Serra's "My Curves Are Not Mad," made of two 44-foot-long curved steel plates, was unnerving in the way the 50-ton pieces seemed to lean, looking as if they might fall over if the wind blew too hard.

The sunny weather drew many for lunch at the sleek, contemporary cafe, which is catered by one of Dallas's best-known restaurants, the Mansion on Turtle Creek, to dine on the terrace facing the garden and its 24 outdoor sculptures. The cafe serves light fare like various salads, barbecued turkey and the Mansion's famous tortilla soup; prices range from $6 to $11.

Sitting at one table was Mr. Nasher himself. I wanted to tap him on the shoulder and tell him I understood what he meant when he often has said that he and Patsy had bought only works that "gave us butterflies." After several hours at the Nasher Sculpture Center, I, too, felt the flutterings of excitement.

Mr. Nasher has lofty ambitions for the center, vowing to make it an international focal point and catalyst for the study, installation, conservation and appreciation of modern and contemporary sculpture. Plans include playing host to visiting scholars, showing traveling exhibitions from abroad, lectures, musical performances and educational programs. Not to mention attracting visitors from that other art-loving city to the west.

I have a feeling I'll be driving to Dallas a lot more often now.

The Nasher Sculpture Center, at 2001 Flora Street, is open every day but Monday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and till 9 p.m. on Thursday. General admission to the museum and garden is $10 and includes an audio tour. Information: (214) 242-5100 or www.nashersculpturecenter.org. (http://www.nashersculpturecenter.org.)


KATHRYN JONES is a contributing editor for Texas Monthly.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/23/travel/23dallas.html

[Columbus Civil]

AFTER living in Fort Worth for more than 20 years, I didn't have to think too much until recently about where to take out-of-town visitors - or myself, for that matter - to see the best art in northern Texas. We always headed straight to Fort Worth's cultural district, home of the Kimbell Art Museum, the Amon Carter Museum and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, reincarnated last year in a stunning new Tadao Ando structure. In a morning or afternoon of museum-hopping, we could see Rembrandts, Cézannes and Picassos at the Kimbell; Remingtons and O'Keeffes at the Amon Carter; and Pollocks, de Koonings and Warhols at the Modern.




AND




Driving east on Interstate 30 toward the skyscrapers jutting from the concrete prairie, I tried to recall the last time I went to Dallas to visit a museum, but couldn't. After all, the city is better known for its professional football team and mammoth shopping centers than for fine art.


Told you the DMA blows.

[gc]

I like the press...period.

[boozo]

On Fridays I get out of work at noon, so I decided to ride my bike downtown.

Dealey Plaza was the most crowded I have ever seen. So many people.

I rode over to the Nasher and it was even more packed!

All the parking was full and people were streaming everywhere. It was really inspiring.

Regarding:"Told you the DMA blows."

Shouldn't art be judged by it's own merits? I've seen pieces in Ft. Worth that sucked and stuff in the DMA that took by breath away. And vice-versa. That's a museum for you.

[Columbus Civil]

Shouldn't art be judged by it's own merits? I've seen pieces in Ft. Worth that sucked and stuff in the DMA that took by breath away. And vice-versa. That's a museum for you.

If that helps you get over the blowing, then sure.

[aceplace]

Boozo,

I agree...

The writer of the piece, by her own admission, knows nothing about the Dallas museum scene...

... admits she never comes here...

[aceplace]

ColumbusCivil,

Hate to disagree with you, but the blowhards in the Metroplex come out of Fort Worth...

Good people come out of there, too...

[tamtagon]

Now that the DMA charges admission, perhaps it will bank enough money to be competitive toward the purchase of more highly regarded art. I've still got my fingers crossed that some of Dallas' old money folk will donate art and money to the DMA. The informed art community as had a constant perception of the DMA as a decent facility with little substance. The high profile Nasher will only accent this perception of the DMA. Perhaps this accurate opinion will begin to get in the crawl of reluctant philanthropists and net the DMA something to cheer about other than old dishes and bric-a-brack from Central America.

[gc]

I am not taking any sides here. However, it is easy to dismiss any type of art when you know nothing about it, or what the artist was trying convey, or you know nothing about art at all (i.e. the trailer with piano)!

Anyways, this is about the Nasher Sculpture Center....not FW vs Dallas art scene. Let's take that discussion to the appropriate thread.

[bloodandpopcorn]

Agreed, GCarrey. ColumbusCivil, it really seems as if your only intent was to upset people like myself who do like the DMA. But we have other topics for the two camps to get into arguments. So this is all I'll say on that.

I'm extremely happy about that article, though, and I hope it gets people from the NE down to check out the Nasher. I do wish she had mentioned the Meadows Museum, though, as I think it's at least as important and impressive as the Nasher. If only it were downtown, as well...

[Columbus Civil]

That was indeed my intent.

However, arguments like this are probably more suited to a deserted playground or a dark alley, so I will refrain from starting them here. Just pray you never meet me in either place.

[evdallas]

went to the nasher again today, what a great place.