My good, close, very personal friend Paul Goldberger has a few words on Vanity Fair‘s site this morning about Museum Tower (aka the Towering Inferno). Goldberger begins by saying:
“The hottest news in architecture right now is, well, about heat. And light. And how there is too much of both of them in Dallas, where something called Museum Tower, a 42-story condominium with a façade of highly reflective glass, has risen beside the Nasher Sculpture Center, the building by Renzo Piano that is one of the nation’s most admired small museums.”
And then concludes:
Scott Johnson, the architect of Museum Tower, “told The New York Times, ‘I can’t say sitting here now that the Nasher may not need to do something on their end.’ Why, in heaven’s name, should they have to? The Nasher was there first, it didn’t create the problem, and it is suffering from it. When there were far less serious amounts of glare coming from Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the hall quickly took responsibility and made adjustments to its façade. The source of a nuisance — whether noise, or falling debris, or glare — is normally where responsibility for fixing the problem lies, not with the victim. Replacing 42 stories of glass with something less reflective, or covering the present glass with some kind of sun baffle to block the reflections, wouldn’t be cheap. But aren’t builders and their architects and engineers supposed to know the properties of a material before they use it?”
