Nine Lively Acres Downtown

By Wolf Von Eckardt

In an age of razzle-dazzle, the Dallas museum is joyfully simple

Museums are now civic centers for the celebration of art, rather than simply treasuries of the past. Increasingly they are offering concerts, film programs, lectures, children's activities and education programs that reach far out into the community. They also house restaurants and, of late, the most booming branch of the booming museum biz, museum shops. Attendance keeps increasing, not only because of a still growing interest in art and culture, but also because of a growing need to experience a sense of community. Architect Edward Larrabee Barnes' Dallas Museum of Art, which opened to the public last week, is the latest and most successful example of integrating community activities with the display of objects. European museums, like Paris' Louvre, originated with royal collections. In America, the old Ecole des Beaux-Arts temples were usually built to stand apart from the city's commercial bustle. The first modern museum to break the pattern was, appropriately enough, New York City's Museum of Modern Art, which in 1939 built its first new home in the heart of downtown. While the old museums featured formal, skylit rooms, MOMA presented its art on open, loftlike floors that could be partitioned or rearranged like stage sets. MOMA, now topped by Architect Cesar Pelli's 52-story, income-producing condominium tower, remains a handsomely modest structure. It was followed, however, by a veritable binge of architectural experimentation in museum construction.

Some of the buildings were ego trips that overpowered the art they were to shelter and display, among them Frank Lloyd Wright's dizzying Guggenheim Museum (1959) and Marcel Breuer's brutal Whitney Museum of American Art (1966), both in New York City. Philip Johnson's Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln (1963) returned to a somewhat saccharine classicism. But the one museum of that hectic period that seemed to work best for the display of art was Barnes' Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (1971). Its architectural form is not particularly memorable, but it is a pleasant, even festive building.

Says Barnes: "We wanted the visitor to remember painting in space, sculpture against sky and a sense of continuous flow, a sense of going somewhere." Barnes, 68, studied with Bauhaus Leaders Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer at Harvard, and has kept faith with their nononsense, functionalist International Style. His new 43-story IBM building in Manhattan, for all its green granite elegance, carries this style to an absurdly defiant extreme. His Dallas museum, on the other hand, is a joy precisely because at a time of architectural razzle-dazzle, it is so endearingly simple. It is thoughtfully and beautifully designed architecture in the service of art. Covering nearly nine acres at the foot of Dallas' downtown skyscrapers, the museum consists of a low composition of geometric forms, dominated by an imposing 40-ft-high barrel vault. The entire building is of limestone, cut in huge blocks and coursed with deep V cuts.

It does not look monumental, let alone massive, but it is self-assured and virtually throbs with energy. The stoic exterior conveys a sense of the various spaces inside. They include landscaped courtyards and an enchanting 1.2-acre sculpture garden. From the moment Barnes started working on the design in the fall of 1977, he envisioned the proposed museum as a catalyst and cornerstone of a new cultural district to enrich and enliven downtown Dallas. He helped select the site, at a point where a section of a nearby freeway is sunken rather than elevated. And he placed the front entrance of his building at the end of Flora Street, a dilapidated road in a fairly dingy area. As a result of Barnes' vision, Dallas has discovered and is preserving a number of interesting old buildings on Flora and has decided to turn the street into a grand boulevard that will be flanked by a proposed concert hall, already designed by Architect I.M. Pei. One half of the 60-acre district is to be devoted to nonprofit cultural use, the remainder to compatible commercial development.

All buildings along the boulevard are to have ground-floor display windows to provide interest at eye level. The museum's interior is designed for unusual ease of movement.

Visitors may enter from the proposed boulevard, from the downtown side or from a parking lot. These three entrances are connected by a hallway, separating the galleries from the other facilities. The hallway crosses Barnes' great vault, in which are placed big and colorful works of contemporary art by Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. Arranged on three levels, the permanent collection flows through the history of art like a calm river. As Barnes and the museum's chief curator, Steven Nash, have designed the displays, there are no needlessly harsh and categorical boundaries between cultures, ages and styles. A meticulously realistic 1867 Ernest Meissonier (a scene from the Napoleonic campaigns) hangs next to an audaciously surrealist 1947 Rene Magritte (a floating nude), and it works. Here too is "a sense of going somewhere." The galleries' dimensions, the nature and quality of their light and the texture of their floors (limestone, carpet and oak) keep changing. Some walls are washed in daylight. Some have windows that look out on either a garden court or a patio with a pool of water. At every turn Barnes affords the visitor an interesting vista or a refreshing pause. Says he: "This kind of punctuation provides a counterpoint by relating art to nature." Children will love their part of the museum, a cluster of galleries with neon-tube sculpture and all kinds of hands-on doodads. Old folks will cherish sitting in the sculpture garden with its waterwalls and greenery. Even the cost-conscious should be happy: the building came in at $50 million, some $2 million less than had been raised.

Barnes, with important help from Museum Director Harry S. Parker III and his curators, has created more than an exceptionally fine museum. Along with the proposed cultural district, it promises to make downtown the civilized center of the growing Dallas region.