Christopher Hawthorne is a fine architectural critic, so it was nice the bankrupt LA Times scratched up the money for him to look over Dallas’s new AT&T Peformings Arts Center. That he found nothing to add to what has been already been said (by John King here or by Peter Simek here) does not necessarily betray any lack of imaginative critical acumen. His lack of success didn’t keep him, however, for searching for something, anything, to say:
This month’s issue of D Magazine, which is almost entirely dedicated to coverage of the new performing arts center and the larger arts district of which it is a part, is full of sentences like this one about the developer Trammell Crow: “Crow was the first developer to buy into the proposed arts district, and the 90,000 square feet he purchased in the summer of 1978 for about $20 a square foot was worth $125 a square foot within three years.”
Actually, I can’t find another sentence like that in the entire issue, so it is not “full of sentences” like this at all. And by the way, that one sentence appeared in this article we reprinted from 1982 to give readers a perspective on the 25-year struggle to build the arts district . I’m glad Christopher was even able to find it, much less pluck it out. But it’s a long flight home, I suppose, and he did have column inches to fill.
