Condo in Dallas Harms Sculpture Collection

We all know what sunlight can do to collections of fine and decorative art. Bloomberg is reporting that a luxury high rise in Dallas is harming the Nasher sculpture garden.  Light reflecting off the new 42 story condominium building and passes through the roof of the enclosed galleries of the Nasher. The museum is now working on lighting solutions.

Bloomberg reports

The Museum Tower, a 42-story condominium in Dallas, borrowed cachet from the neighboring Nasher Sculpture Center to brand itself and sell $4 million apartments.

Then it proceeded to fry the museum’s art with the glare from its glass walls. The two-year-long dispute has boiled over recently with city-council members and the arts community calling for solutions and one man losing his job over phony Facebook postings.

The Nasher is a sculpture garden edged by enclosed galleries covered with a glass roof that lets daylight display the art. Museums across the U.S. have fallen in love with architect Renzo Piano in large part because of his bravura manipulation of daylight.

One of Dallas’s cultural jewels, the Nasher houses a collection assembled by Raymond Nasher, a shopping-center developer, and his wife, Patsy. Major museums sought the collection, which includes artists ranging from Picasso and Mark di Suvero to Barbara Hepworth and Anish Kapoor.

Working with lighting designers at the global engineering firm Arup, Piano designed a glass roof with a painstakingly engineered metal screen mounted above it that filters the harsh local sunlight through egg-shaped openings aimed north. Such gentler light is deemed best for art.

The $200 million Museum Tower began shooting searing beams of light directly into the apertures as its reflective glass panels were applied. The reflections burned plants and ruined the effect of the Skyspace James Turrell built in the sculpture garden.

My Bad

The tower’s architect, Scott Johnson of the Los Angeles firm Johnson Fain, has unintentionally turned what is usually just annoying into a harmful phenomenon. In an interview, he said that he had visited and admired the Nasher with its director, Jeremy Strick, prior to construction and was aware of the building’s reliance on roof light.

Still, he went ahead and designed the tower with its broadest side facing both the garden and the intense afternoon sun and sheathed it in floor-to-ceiling glass.

The tower plan is oval-shaped and its sides taper, both qualities that aim more glass at the Nasher for longer periods of time than a flat building would.

Johnson said he assumed the reflections wouldn’t be harmful. He might have thought of the glare focused by the polished surface of Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, which made global headlines by searing surrounding buildings and blinding drivers.

His client, the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System, could have reminded him that an earlier owner of the site had added a covenant (since expired) that required any future development not to harm the Nasher’s light.

‘So Sad’

“I am so sad about this,” Johnson said. He should be.

The Nasher has hired experts who propose that the Museum Tower add less-reflective retractable shades. Such systems are used in Europe where it is deemed an insane waste of energy to build an all-glass wall facing directly into the hottest sun angle. In a phone conversation, architect Piano said he had included such screens in a Berlin tower built for Debis, the financing arm of Mercedes Benz, in 1998.

Retrofitting the Museum Tower comes with a host of technical challenges and costs, and the pension system has rejected it in favor of a new light-filtering system for the Nasher that would reorient the apertures, screening the reflections from the tower. The Nasher says the configuration won’t light the galleries properly and fails to solve the burning of shrubbery in the garden.

Source: Bloomberg