Dallas Museum of Art Plans Dubious ‘Reinvention’ for Its Building

E arlier this week, I wrote about my visit two weeks ago to the Dallas Museum of Art. I love the DMA for the quality of its collection, its exhibitions, the many friendships I’ve enjoyed with its staff and trustees, and, let’s face it, it’s in Texas. The museum beautifully expresses civic pride and culture.

The DMA’s big news is its launch of a two-stage global competition among architects for an expansion and “sweeping reinvention” at a cost of $150 million to $175 million, which means a starting point of $175 million, which means, and this doesn’t take a crystal ball, $225 million, but only if trustees stand athwart and shout “nada mas!”

For the first stage of the competition, the museum invited architects to submit their team, which means not only the architectural firm and its credentials but the landscape architect, exhibition designer, and engineers. The deadline for submissions was March 15. The DMA will sift through these and invite five firms to make a detailed proposal. I read the call for submissions — a nice, meaty, 55-page document — with great interest.

The original DMA building opened in 1984. It was designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, who did lots of museum projects with a cool, self-assured look, a sleek and modern take on the Greek temple. It has expanded since then to about 700,000 square feet. Made from high-end materials and with lovely finishes, it still looks good.

Augustín Arteaga, the DMA’s director, wants to set a new standard for an era when the very concept of a museum is in flux. “The DMA needs greater physical visibility,” the museum has told potential competitors for the redo. “It needs to be transparent, needs to show what’s going on inside, and be emotionally woven in the city’s fabric, and be welcoming and accessible to all.”

The Barnes building “was designed for a different Dallas, a different time, and a different society.” I doubt J. R. Ewing was a museumgoer, but the point is well-taken.

Parsing what the museum says, I see a few goals. The Barnes building “forefronts elegance and quiet dignity,” and that’s true. The request for the proposal notes that this can be read as “unwelcoming, off-putting, and defensive.” I always pull for elegance and quiet dignity to work their magic. Those who find this look and feel unwelcoming, off-putting, and defensive are either neurotic or art-know-nothings looking for excuses not to visit.

And, no, I don’t believe a museum “needs to show what’s going on inside.” The best way to build an audience is free admission, demonically marketed. The DMA’s already free, but how many people know it’s free and for them?

It makes sense to save tens of millions of dollars and ditch the transparency shtick, “knowing what’s going on inside,” and the woven emotion. People can use their imaginations. Aside from having greeters to answer questions and providing speedy access to art, I’m not sure what more a museum should do to welcome visitors. It’s not a spa, it’s not Disneyland, and it’s not a day-care center.

So, for starters I see false values. I’m more than suspicious and skeptical when I hear the words “sweeping reinvention.” It scares the bejesus out of me, fleeing on the next stagecoach to Albany.

The existing museum needs to be renovated, the DMA says. This makes sense. It’s a 40-year-old building. Every system, I’m sure, needs updating, but the DMA has had half a dozen interventions over the years, so I wonder how much updating and maintenance were done along the way. The place needs more gallery space. It’s getting some very substantial bequests of art and fractional gifts of art and wants to display these as well as good things that languish in the vault year after year. It wants more flexible galleries and more galleries for big, contemporary things, as well as clearer circulation and the elimination of steps.

A new auditorium, restaurant, café, shop, and offices for the staff are also on the to-do list. A great museum needs a great auditorium, to be sure. While a museum isn’t a dining hall, Texans like good food, and Dallas isn’t Boston or New York, where everything is nearby. In Dallas, everything’s a schlep.

And the job needs to be finished by 2028, the museum’s 125th anniversary.

What the DMA wants is a new campus, and a diversity, inclusion, and equity one at that. This is a new architectural genre. I’m curious to see what architects do with it. If it’s like DIE in staff hiring and management, it’ll be a straitjacket and a curse. We’re living in a surly, glum moment now. DIE is the poisoned fruit growing from our zeitgeist. Why let it inspire our architecture?

I’ve written about economic efficiency in new museum buildings, which, in my humble opinion, needs to be a priority. Museums express civic pride and ambition but are, after all, charities, and nothing’s sadder or more corrosive than a charity that abuses philanthropy.

The Barnes building, elegant, quietly dignified, and out-of-style as it is, is still a perfectly good building. It was the anchor of a new arts district that was mostly empty lots and warehouses in 1984 but now has a lovely opera house, the Nasher Sculpture Center, a great high school for the performing arts, and new skyscrapers and parks. Now, the DMA might seem puny and frumpy. It’s Alice Faye in a sea of new, sassy Betty Grables, not to mention Amarillo’s own Cyd Charisse and El Paso’s Debbie Reynolds.

Still, Dallas isn’t Los Angeles, with its throwaway culture. And Dallas is serious about philanthropy. It’s a city with lots of millionaires and billionaires who like big, new projects, but it’s not the kind of place that blows $150 million or $200 million or $300 million on a new museum building “because we can.”

Though Texas didn’t, by choice, devastate its economy and schools during the Covid mass hysteria, I’m sure Dallas has many causes that are worthy, as the DMA is, and also needy, which the DMA isn’t. Now isn’t the time for big museum projects that address abstract, puffy themes. The moment’s always right, though, for work that improves essential systems and provides more space for art.

The DMA’s redo also comes in the wake of the new Nancy and Rich Kinder Building at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, which I reviewed and is smashing. Vermonters aren’t competitive — our forebears were marginal farmers — but I suspect that Dallas and Houston are. I wonder what Dallas can get for $175 million, which is its current high end. Houston’s Kinder building cost $475 million, and it opened almost three years ago.