Tag Archives: Renzo Piano

What I learned this week, June 15, 2012

Posted on by Bill Chance

When I walked around the Chihuly glass exhibit at the Arboretum… here, here, here, here, here, here, and here – I heard one questions several times. People asked, “What happens when it hails.”

This is Texas, and they don’t say “if” it hails, they say, “when.” Even the Arboretum literature addresses that. It said that the glass is tougher than you think, and that Chihuly has capacity standing by to replace anything that breaks. When it hails.

Well, it hailed. It looks like the only damange is to the white blossoms in the Persian garden pool, the ones I saw the second time I visited the exhibition. They said the works will be replaced and the rest of the glass is unscathed.

The Chihuly glass in the Persian Garden Pool that was damaged by hail at the Dallas Arboretum. This photo was taken before the storm.

Hail Damages Chihuly Exhibit at Dallas Arboretum  

For those of you from places where the weather isn’t quite so… Texas-like, here’s some homespun video of what we live with here. All from Thursday afternoon.

http://youtu.be/aNbgsxnTN8w

 

Nasher architect Renzo Piano pleads for a solution from Museum Tower

From the article:

Piano says that because the Nasher is a privately held collection, it is free to leave its Flora Street museum and go elsewhere — although he noted that this is not something the Nasher family wants to do, that it was the dream of founder Raymond Nasher to put his collection in the Dallas Arts District at that location. Were Nasher alive today, Piano says, he would “mad, mad, mad, mad, mad.”

I agree, I think the Nasher is playing way too nice with this. If it were my collection I would be in talks with, say New York City and see if the colection could be relocated to… maybe a nice site in Central Park. They would leap at the chance. I know the city of Dallas would be hurt by the move, but to make it up they could use the Nasher site for low income housing and maybe a homeless shelter. I’m sure the Museum Tower next door would enjoy that.

The Museum Tower Condominiums tower over Tony Cragg’s “Lost in Thought”

Finally, a Dallas Food Truck Park.   Coming soon. Faster, please.

Debating the Root Cause of Zombie Infrastructure

From the article:

For generations, government policies have been geared toward creating endless landscapes of strip malls like the one Bentivolio looks at with such fondness. In the process we have gutted our traditional downtowns. We have eaten up farmland and forest. We have, …, endangered the lives of our senior citizens. We have engineered a world where children cannot walk or bike to school without risking their lives. We have created countless places devoid of any real social value.

Why You Shouldn’t Be A Writer

An interesting article, but one that, for me at least, is ultimately useless. You might as well send a heroin addict an piece of paper listing the inconvieniences of shooting up.

Thomas Pynchon: Another Author Concedes to Digital

Oh, good! Now I can carry Gravity’s Rainbow around on my Kindle.

Swedish Edition of Gravity’s Rainbow

I’ve discovered that one of my favorite cult bands, My Favorite, is now The Secret History… with the same quirky feel. Good stuff.

A Seven-Song Primer On Michael Grace Jr., New York’s New Wave Cult Hero

What’s going on this weekend?

Well, on Friday, there’s the Arts District Summer Block Party.  These are always a lot of fun. I might do Late Night at the DMA. The Nasher has been showing kid’s movies on an inflatable screen in the garden, but this week it’s 500 Days of Summer. I’m getting a little tired of Zooey Deshanel’s Goofy Quirky Zany Adorkable Hipster Doofus persona… but still…

Then, on Saturday, the Deep Ellum Outdoor Market is growing and ecompassing Filipino Fest – which sounds like fun.

Sunday? Don’t know yet… but I feel like maybe some Oak Cliff…. Maybe some Bar Belmont. Oh, Shakespeare in the Park is starting up with Twelfth Night.

Any other ideas?

http://youtu.be/XkZK-A0fxFs

It’s been a bad year for great musicians.
RIP Eduard Khil

http://youtu.be/1orMXD_Ijbs

What I learned this week, May 4, 2012

Posted on by Bill Chance

I have been writing about the ultra-expensive condominium Museum Tower cooking the Nasher sculpture center the same way a bully with a magnifying glass burns the ants on the sidewalk:
here
here
and here

The New York Times now has an article on the issue,

Dallas Museum Simmers in a Neighbor’s Glare

There are a couple of interesting quotes. First, from the Los Angeles based architect that designed this monstrocity:

Scott Johnson, the Los Angeles architect who designed Museum Tower, said he was willing to consider remedies but that the Nasher also had to be open-minded. “My responsibility is to fully vet solutions vis-à-vis Museum Tower — that’s my building,” he said. “But I can’t say sitting here now that the Nasher may not need to do something on their end.”

So, you see his concern for the neighbor (The Museum) that actually made his project (The Museum Tower) possible. I would imagine it would have been a good idea to “fully vet” his design before the thing was built, don’t you?

And also, a fact I did not know, that helps to emphasize the whole political disgustedness of the whole thing:

Complicating matters is that the $200 million Museum Tower is owned by the Dallas Police & Fire Pension System, on whose board sit four members of the City Council.

Ok, that makes it even more clear how the developers knew they could get away with this without the city doing a thing to stop them. Remember, none of this went into action until Raymond Nasher died – then the powers that be moved in to devour the carcass of his philanthropic vision.

The final word is from the livid Renzo Piano… who just might know a little about this sort of thing.

“By doing this, they kill what they use to sell it,” Mr. Piano said.

I think that, right now, the tower should be requred to change its name (Maybe to “Death Star Condominium Tower”) and to remove all reference to the Nasher Museum from its sales pitch (where it, of course, figures very prominantly). Actually, they should be required to warn their potential residents of the skin cancer danger poised by the neighbor next door due to the reflected sunlight.

The Museum Tower Condominiums tower over Tony Cragg’s “Lost in Thought”

From Bloomberg: Dallas Museum Seeks to Shade Pension-Backed Tower’s Sunny Glare

Nine Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School

Optical Design

15(ish) Things Worth Knowing About Coffee

Dallas Arts District Architecture Tour

Posted on by Bill Chance

The guide for our walking tour in the Dallas Arts District, standing at the end of the barrel vault at the Dallas Museum of Art, gestured toward the towering spire of Postmodern granite, the Trammell Crow Building, and said, “in the eighties there was a building boom in downtown Dallas.”

That simple sentence brought the memories tumbling out of the cowbwebby recesses of my creaking old head. At that time, I was working at the old Cotton Exchange building, only a few blocks away, and I would look out of my office window every day and watch the progress of the Trammell Crow tower as it rose out the enormous hole where a cracked parking lot used to be. It went up fast, it grew like a weed. I was young then, I still gave a shit, and was fascinated with the construction techniques – pouring the concrete floors and support columns, the utilities, the dark glass, and the polished granite cladding. I did not know what it would look like when finished and watching it grow was like a slow-motion puzzle being solved right in front of me. The building was assembled inside-out and looking at it now, almost thirty years later, I still know its innermost secrets.

Trammell Crow Center and the Winspear Sunscreen

The Winspear Opera House is surrounded by a massive sixty foot high sunscreen made of aluminum louvers.It is amazing how much cooler the killer Texas heat is under this high-tech shade. The picture shows a small section of the slats with the tip of the Trammell Crow Center beyond.

The Dallas Museum of Art was also built while I worked down there. Admission was free when it was new and I would walk over there almost every day at lunch and pick out one single painting or sculpture and stare at it until I felt that I possessed it completely.

Yesterday, I checked the Friday Newspaper (online, of course) to see if there was anything interesting to do over the weekend and I found a notice about a walking tour of the architecture of the Dallas Arts District at ten AM on Saturday. That sounded like a plan.

A pole-sitting sculpture in front of a new Condo Tower going up.

A pole-sitting sculpture in front of a new Condo Tower going up.

It was interesting… and although I’m pretty familiar with the Arts District, I did learn a few things.

At the turn of the century or so (1899, not Y2K) Ross Avenue was the street where all the wealthy scions of Dallas built their mansions. The only one remaining, The Belo Mansion was purchased and rebuilt by the Dallas Bar Association. Prior to that, for many years it was leased to a funeral parlor. In 1934, Clyde Barrow’s bullet-ridden corpse was displayed and attracted a crowd of thirty thousand macabre curious onlookers.

I was a little disappointed that the wonderful European sculpture was gone from the walk around the base Trammell Crow Building. Our guide said it had been moved to the Old Parkland Campus and that it would soon be replaced by a garden of Asian sculpture. That will be cool.

Of course, it’s common knowledge that the district features public buildings designed by four Pritzker Prize winning architects – I.M. Pei and the Morton Meyerson Symphony Center, Renzo Piano and the Nasher Sculpture Center, Norman Foster and the Winspear Opera House, and Rem Koolhaas and the Wyly Theater. At the east end of Flora street is the City Performance Hall (under construction) and the One Arts Plaza mixed-use development. It’s a bit sterile sown there on the east, but there is still a lot of construction.

Guadalupe Cathedral

The Bell Tower of the Guadalupe Cathedral framed by skyscrapers. Taken next to the construction site of the new City Performance Hall.

We ended the tour there on the east end of Flora. I walked back taking some pictures. The Nasher was open for free, and I couldn’t resist a visit. The Trammel Crow Collection of Asian Art across the street is often overlooked – but it is always free and although it is small, there is always something wonderful to be found there. This time it was the art of Tenzin Norbu and Penba Wandu – they combine ancient techniques with a modern spin – the results are stunning. Norbu‘s painting, “Story of the Northern Plain” was the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in a long time.

The tour was fun. I guess they do these every now and then, if you find yourself in the Big D, I highly recommend it.

Aluminum Tube Skin on the Wyly Theater

Aluminum Tube Skin on the Wyly Theater

Calder, Rodin, and Yoga

Eve, by Auguste Rodin, Three Bollards, by Alexandre Calder, and a yoga class.

Worshipping a New God.

Worshipping a New God.

Headless Construction

Headless Construction. Magdalena Abakanowicz, Bronze Crowd, and the Condo Tower being built next door.

Balloon Room

At the Nasher, they had a room full of balloons. It was an installation by British Artist Martin Creed. Children were queued up for a chance to get inside.

Inside the Nasher’s Balloon Room