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| Raymond D. Nasher |
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.
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.
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| ITALIAN MASTER: Architect Renzo Piano. |
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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| FACE OFF: The Meyerson and the Nasher make good neighbors. |
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.
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| An interior view of one of three large exhibition bays. |
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.”
