The Dallas Museum of Artwork has introduced a shortlist of six groups that may compete to reimagine its Artwork District campus, and for those who have been hoping for the sudden (or a Black or Latinx architect) you’ll be disenchanted. A plum fee, it had drawn broad curiosity from each established and youthful, extra experimental corporations emboldened by the museum’s open name for submissions.
The museum’s choice committee, nonetheless, has leaned in to the tried and true — with one notable exception — selecting a gaggle of corporations with distinguished data of museum constructing.
“The chosen groups characteristic luminaries but additionally smaller, less-known however gifted studios,” mentioned museum director Agustín Arteaga, in an announcement, calling the group “an exhilarating mixture of expertise and design strategy.”
These groups are:
- David Chipperfield, the London-based winner of the latest Pritzker Prize, is broadly revered for his exact and well-crafted fashionable design. His museum work consists of the celebrated enlargement of the St. Louis Museum of Artwork in 2013, however he was notably changed final 12 months by the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, which had commissioned him to design a brand new fashionable wing. The Chipperfield workforce consists of the panorama architects James Nook Area Operations and the design agency Pentagram.
- Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the New York-based architects recognized finest for the Excessive Line. The agency’s museum work consists of the 2019 enlargement of New York’s Museum of Fashionable Artwork. Final 12 months, the agency unveiled an overhaul plan for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kalita Humphreys Theater, a undertaking that has stirred appreciable controversy for each its projected value (north of $300 million) and its intrusion into park area. The DS+R workforce consists of the panorama architects Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, designers of the proposed park between the Trinity levees.
- Johnston Marklee, the Los Angeles agency of companions Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, architects of the crisp-lined 2018 Menil Drawing Institute in Houston. The agency can be joined by panorama architects Hargreaves Jones, whose current Dallas work consists of the redesign of Carpenter Park.
- Michael Maltzan Structure, one other distinguished Los Angeles architect and design agency, most not too long ago of that metropolis’s Sixth Road Viaduct. The Maltzan workforce consists of panorama architects Studio Zewde and the structural engineer Man Nordenson.
- Weiss/Manfredi, the New York-based architects whose Dallas work features a performing arts heart for the Greenhill Faculty. Weiss/Manfredi have additionally been commissioned to remake the decommissioned Dawson State Jail as a welcome heart for the proposed Trinity Park. Their workforce consists of panorama architects Hood Design Studio.
- Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos, a Madrid-based follow led by Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano, designers of quite a few museum tasks in Europe. Their design workforce is joined by the panorama architects SWA, whose Dallas work consists of the design of Pacific Plaza.
The outlier on this group is Nieto Sobejano, who’re digital unknowns in the US, whereas the opposite 5 have substantial reputations and lengthy expertise engaged on advanced constructing tasks in the US.
The winner will definitely have a problem earlier than it. The museum’s objectives embrace including exhibition area to accommodate a number of promised collections comprising greater than 1,000 works; bettering navigation; bettering visibility and connection inside the Arts District; and updating its outdated infrastructural techniques. Rehabilitating the museum’s crumbling sculpture backyard, a landmark design by Dan Kiley, also needs to be a precedence. That’s rather a lot to ask, even with a price range pegged at $150 million to $175 million.
The conceptual query going through the design groups is precisely methods to strategy Edward Larrabee Barnes’ museum, an austere work of modernism inbuilt 1984 and expanded by Barnes in 1993. Arteaga, clearly, considers it out of date and would love one thing with extra pizzazz. “It’s time for our constructing to evolve to fulfill the present and future wants of our numerous and expansive collections and communities,” he mentioned, when the museum introduced this competitors.
Barnes’ design just isn’t with out its virtues, nonetheless compromised they’ve develop into through the years, and the design groups can be nicely suggested to embrace and work with its qualities — restraint, readability, a way of development — moderately than eradicate them totally. The six chosen groups will talk about their visions at a public discussion board on the museum on Could 13. A public exhibition of their proposed schemes will likely be held in July, with a winner introduced in August. Every workforce will obtain a $50,000 honorarium and $10,000 for design bills.
