The hottest news in architecture right now is, well, about heat. And light. And how there is too much of both of them in Dallas, where something called Museum Tower, a 42-story condominium with a façade of highly reflective glass, has risen beside the Nasher Sculpture Center, the building by Renzo Piano that is one of the nation’s most admired small museums. Much of the Nasher’s collection is in its sculpture garden, the best urban garden of its kind in the country after the Museum of Modern Art’s. At times the garden, which was designed by the landscape architect Peter Walker, has experienced such intense glare from its new neighbor that its grass has burned. When the sun is in a certain position in late afternoon the light bouncing off the condominium is so strong that you can’t look in its direction. You can’t look in the opposite direction either, because then you’d be looking right into the sun. You want to keep your head down, which is not what I would call an ideal condition for viewing some of the world’s greatest works of sculpture, including pieces by Rodin, George Segal, and Richard Serra.
The situation is worse inside. Piano, who is known for his careful and precise handling of light, gave the Nasher’s galleries a roof of gently arching glass, topped by a specially designed screen of perforated aluminum, shaped so that it blocks direct sunlight as the sun moves in its daily arc from east to west. The screen lets light in from the north, always the favored direction for artists’ studios and galleries, since north light is soft, even, and indirect. But now Piano’s screen has been rendered effectively useless, because the brightest light of all pours into the museum from the north, creating not only glare but also awkward shadows across the walls and on many of the works of art. The reflected glare is two and a half times as intense as normal sunlight, according to one study commissioned by the Nasher.
The two parties, the museum and the condominium, which, in both address and name, sought to take advantage of its location next door to the museum—now there is an irony for you—are now in mediation. They are scheduled to meet again in mid-May. It’s hard to know what the mediation will accomplish, since the developers of the condo tower and their Los Angeles architect, Scott Johnson, have so far done little to accept responsibility. In an exhaustive report on the issue in D, Dallas’s city magazine, Tim Rogers quoted the developers as asking the Nasher what it was prepared to do to help, as if this were a negotiation in which both sides were expected to give an equal amount to reach an amicable compromise. Johnson, for his part, told The New York Times,* *“I can’t say sitting here now that the Nasher may not need to do something on their end.”
Why, in heaven’s name, should they have to? The Nasher was there first, it didn’t create the problem, and it is suffering from it. When there were far less serious amounts of glare coming from Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the hall quickly took responsibility and made adjustments to its façade. The source of a nuisance—whether noise, or falling debris, or glare—is normally where responsibility for fixing the problem lies, not with the victim. Replacing 42 stories of glass with something less reflective, or covering the present glass with some kind of sun baffle to block the reflections, wouldn’t be cheap. But aren’t builders and their architects and engineers supposed to know the properties of a material before they use it?
