DALLAS l Perot Museum of Nature & Science at Victory Park

[jtk1519]

Plans for Perot Museum of Nature & Science at Victory Park to be unveiled today
11:54 AM CDT on Thursday, September 17, 2009
By SCOTT CANTRELL / The Dallas Morning News
scantrell@dallasnews.com

Plans for the boldest piece of modern architecture to hit Dallas are being unveiled today. The Perot Museum of Nature & Science at Victory Park, designed by Pritzker Prize laureate Thom Mayne and his California architecture firm Morphosis, is expected to break ground this year and open in early 2013.

Schematic renderings and models of the complex will go on public display Saturday at the construction center on the museum's future site at the northwest corner of Field Street and Woodall Rodgers Freeway.

The Morphosis design loudly proclaims the $185 million museum's double focus on science and nature.

The main gallery spaces will be in a big cube-shaped structure as tall as a 14-story building. It will have a stark, high-tech look, with a 150-foot escalator structure jutting out from the south side. A cutaway corner atrium will offer dramatic views of downtown and at night, dramatic views into the building. The cladding has not been determined.

Forming the base of the cube and extending beyond it on the south and east sides will be a low complex of lobby, cafe, shop, auditorium, temporary exhibition space and educational facilities capped with an undulating roof landscaped with rocks and native drought-resistant grasses. An urban plaza will extend from the lobby onto the roof deck. Landscaping will be developed by the local firm Talley Associates.

The main entrance, on the west side, will be approached through a small forest of mature native trees and water features and another open plaza with a sheltered area for cafe tables. Educational facilities will be accessible from a separate, lower-level entrance on the east side designed for school bus drop-offs.

"Every detail of the museum, from the natural path in, to the way the building is structured, really delivers on our mission," said Nicole Small, museum president and CEO. "The building needs to make a bold statement, and nature and science, technology and engineering really meet in this building."

Moving from Fair Park

Now based at Fair Park, the Museum of Nature & Science was formed by the 2006 merger of the Dallas Museum of Natural History, The Science Place and the Dallas Children's Museum. Its new downtown home will include displays on paleontology, earth sciences, energy, gems and minerals, life and medical sciences, engineering and technology, and sports science. A 7,500-square-foot exhibition space is planned for traveling shows.

"Dinosaurs to DNA, we do it all," Small says.

The new building's design was developed in collaboration with several consultants and with input from staff and members of the board of directors who visited more than two dozen science museums in the U.S. and abroad.

Since Morphosis was announced as architect early last year, the project has grown from 150,000 to 180,000 square feet, and from a $155 million price tag to $185 million. That figure covers site acquisition, exhibition planning and design, educational programs and an endowment as well as approximately $82.5 million in actual construction costs. The museum already has pledges of $125 million, including a $50 million lead gift from the children of Margot and H. Ross Perot, for whom the building will be named.

Small is optimistic about raising the rest.

"A lot of museums break ground at 50 percent of capital," she says, "and we're way beyond that. The community has shown real excitement about this project, and we think that's only going to accelerate now that they can see what they're investing in. Science education is so critical to our future. And the thing that's cool about this project is that you're bringing together so many interests."

Prize-winner

The museum building will add another winner of architecture's most prestigious international prize to the four represented in the nearby Dallas Arts District: I.M. Pei, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster and Rem Koolhaas.

Known for designs with dramatically unpredictable geometries, Morphosis counts the new San Francisco Federal Building and the Tour Phare skyscraper in Paris among its projects. The firm's flared and gashed Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art opened this week in New York.

The Perot Museum site, adjacent to the elevated Woodall Rodgers Freeway, is a natural for a 37-year-old architecture practice steeped in iconoclastic California urbanism. And it could help link Victory Park, the West End, the new Woodall Rodgers deck park and the Arts District.

"Dallas is a very modern city," Mayne says, "a post-Los Angeles city. We understood that the building will be very much viewed from the downtown and the freeway, which gave us a reason for increased height."

Mayne describes the vertical part of the design, enclosing six levels from basement to top-of-building mechanicals, as "a distorted cube," which is sliced open and peeled back here and there for glazed views in and out. But the real surprises are in the atrium, with sharp angles and multiplicity of viewpoints.

"As you move into the museum, you're going to look all the way up and see people in layers in all of the galleries," Mayne says. "The diversity of spaces you move through becomes extremely important, and it was very important for us to connect to the city.

"But the lower level is itself an exhibit – a landscape that's going to be developed ecologically and evolve over time. The lobby space moves out into this landscape. It's as if we cut a piece of nature 25 miles outside of Dallas and brought it into the city."

Small says the museum plans to repurpose its buildings in Fair Park. With some modifications, the Nature Building will house the museum's research department. The Science Building is envisioned as a charter math-and-science school for at-risk children.

Plans are uncertain for the Planetarium, which will be superseded by more up-to-date facilities in the new building.

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http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfa...ing_of_the.php






http://forum.dallasmetropolis.com/sh...&postcount=252

[jtk1519]

Renderings Unveiled for $185M Museum

DALLAS-Renderings and a building model for the 180,000-square-foot Perot Museum of Nature & Science at Victory Park have been unveiled for public view. The $185-million project has a fall 2009 groundbreaking and is slated for an early 2013 opening.

The facility, which is being built on just under five acres at 1155 Broom St., is less like a typical museum with Doric columns adorning the front, and more like a floating cube over Victory Park; a cube blending in with the landscape and allowing a great deal of light into the spacious interior. Designed by Pritzker Prize Laureate Thom Mayne and his firm, Morphosis Architects of Los Angeles, the 14-story, 170-foot-tall building contains an acre of rolling roofscape comprised of rock and native drought-resistant grasses, five floors of public space containing 10 exhibition galleries and a children's museum and a multi-media digital cinema that can seat 300 people.

Mayne tells GlobeSt.com that the design was the culmination of a great deal of input, discussions and "desires of the client group," as he puts it. "We were completely attuned to this particular site, program and client as well as the location," says Mayne, who says the project is his first in Texas. "It's adjacent to the freeway (Woodall Rogers Expressway) and at the very end of a cultural corridor."

Mayne says his goal in the building design was to tie it to the landscape, designed by local firm Talley Associates. Another goal was that of movement and sequences; allowing visitors to move through spaces and 10 different venues, and to view new and exciting things as take their trip. On a more practical note, Mayne comments that the building's vertical design also provides future options when it comes to site expansion.

One happy surprise that came out during the design phase was the 54-foot, continuous-flow escalator in a clear tube extending outside of the building. The escalator takes visitors from the lobby atrium to the top floor, where they are faced with a view of Dallas. "That massive escalator is something that's really powerful," Mayne remarks. "It didn't come as a single move, but bit-by-bit. It was a lot of thoughts and ideas glued together until we realized what we had."

Mayne goes on to say this is the way he rolls as an architect; he doesn't go into a project with preconceived notions or ideas. Rather, he works with the site, the program and listens to clients before setting out things on paper. For him, design is more of a collective process, a "manifestation of dialogue," as he puts it.

The Perot Museum is interesting in that it's a relevant project for the day and age. "These days, nature and science are such relevant topics, with concerns over the environment and sustainability," Mayne remarks. "The living thing and its environment are thought of as singular. It's a terrific time to explore this topic, and the building tries to do that."

http://www.globest.com/news/1497_149.../181096-1.html






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http://www.natureandscience.org/expa...the_vision.asp

[jtk1519]

Location with nearby developments for a little neighborhood perspective...

[breathesgelatin]

Looks cool. I've been up to Dallas for sporting events before, and to go to the airport, but I'd really like to go and see the museums and such there.

ETA: Wait. So they are building a parking deck over the freeway?

[KVNBKLYN]

Originally Posted by breathesgelatin

ETA: Wait. So they are building a parking deck over the freeway?

Just in case you weren't being sarcastic, no they're building a deck for a park, not parking.

http://www.wrpproject.com/swf/main.htm

[breathesgelatin]

Originally Posted by KVNBKLYN

Just in case you weren't being sarcastic, no they're building a deck for a park, not parking.

http://www.wrpproject.com/swf/main.htm

I wasn't being sarcastic at all. Thanks.

[jtk1519]

http://forum.dallasmetropolis.com/sh...&postcount=292

[jtk1519]

Museums, armatures for collective societal experience and cultural expression, present new ways of interpreting the world. They contain knowledge, preserve information and transmit ideas; they stimulate curiousity, raise awareness and create opportunities for exchange. As instruments of education and social change, museums have the potential to shape our under- standing of ourselves and the world in which we live.

As our global environment faces ever more critical challenges, a broader understanding of the interdependence of natural systems is becoming more essential to our survival and evolution. Museums dedicated to nature and science play a key role in expanding our understanding of these complex systems.

The new Perot Museum of Nature & Science in Victory Park will create a distinct identity for the Museum, enhance the institution’s prominence in Dallas and enrich the city’s evolving cultural fabric. Designed to engage a broad audience, invigorate young minds, and inspire wonder and curiosity in the daily lives of its visitors, the Museum will cultivate a memorable experience that will persist in the minds of its visitors and that will ultimately broaden indi- viduals’ and society’s understanding of nature and science.

The Museum will strive to achieve the highest standards of sustainability possible for a building of its type. High performance design and incorporation of state of the art technologies will yield a new building that will minimize its impact on the environment.

This world class facility will inspire awareness of science through an immersive and interactive environment that actively engages visitors. Rejecting the notion of museum architecture as neutral background for exhibits, the new building itself becomes an active tool for science education. By integrating architecture, nature, and technology, the building demonstrates scientific principles and stimulates curiosity in our natural surroundings.

The immersive experience of nature within the city begins with the visitor’s approach to the museum, which leads through two native Texas ecologies: a forest of large native canopy trees and a terrace of native desert xeriscaping. The xeriscaped terrace gently slopes up to connect with the museum’s iconic stone roof. The overall building mass is conceived as a large cube floating over the site’s landscaped plinth. An acre of undulating roofscape comprised of rock and native drought-resistant grasses reflects Dallas’s indigenous geology and demonstrates a living system that will evolve naturally over time.

The intersection of these two ecologies defines the main entry plaza, a gathering and event area for visitors and an outdoor public space for the city of Dallas. From the plaza, the land- scaped roof lifts up to draw visitors through a compressed space into the more expansive entry lobby. The topography of the lobby’s undulating ceiling reflects the dynamism of the exterior landscape surface, blurring the distinction between inside and outside, and connect- ing the natural with the manmade.

Moving from the compressed space of the entry, a visitor’s gaze is drawn upward through the soaring open volume of the sky-lit atrium, the building’s primary light-filled circulation space, which houses the building’s stairs, escalators and elevators. From the ground floor, a series of escalators bring patrons though the atrium to the uppermost level of the museum. Patrons arrive at a fully glazed balcony high above the city, with a bird’s eye view of downtown Dallas. From this sky balcony, visitors proceed downward in a clockwise spiral path through the galleries. This dynamic spatial procession creates a visceral experience that engages visitors and establishes an immediate connection to the immersive architectural and natural environ- ment of the museum.

The path descending from the top floor through the museum’s galleries weaves in and out of the building’s main circulation atrium, alternately connecting the visitor with the internal world of the museum and with the external life of the city beyond. The visitor becomes part of the architecture, as the eastern facing corner of the building opens up towards downtown Dallas to reveal the activity within. The museum, is thus, a fundamentally public building – a building that opens up, belongs to and activates the city; ultimately, the public is as integral to the museum as the museum is to the city

http://morphopedia.com/projects/pero...nature-science

[Dallas]

Nice renderings. I was bummed to see that the college football hall of fame went to Atlanta, but there are a lot of exciting things happening now in Dallas. And now with the 10 million dollar donation given to the Trinity River Project, it is an exciting time to live here.

[JACKinBeantown]

Looks like my very first architecture project in my freshman year where we made a cardboard cube and added and deleted portions of it as a study in shape and space. Mine was better.

[sentinel]

It looks so..barren
For a city as large as Dallas, a marquee cultural site like this deserves a better design - I love Thom Mayne's work but for me personally, this project leaves much to be desired.

[jtk1519]

I disagree with the idea that the design is barren. If anything, from some angles, I think you could make the argument that there is too much going on with the design. I think it's shape and design will actually play off the similarly shaped Wyly Theatre on the other side of Woodall Rodgers.

[JoninATX]

saw this u/c today sorry no pixs also the crane is going up

[Atlantan26]

this is going to be an amazing addition to the central core of Dallas. There is such a cool collection of architecture in Dallas, I'm not sure a lot of people realize that.

[jtk1519]

http://forum.dallasmetropolis.com/sh...&postcount=332

[JACKinBeantown]

Originally Posted by jtk1519

It's a stretch, I know. But it's the other thing it reminds me of (besides my cardboard cube when I was 18).

[jtk1519]

[Zerton]

Dallas has been getting some great stuff. It's been a while since I've been to this part of town; is this building within walking distance from the new Koolhaas and Foster buildings?

[texcolo]

^

Yeah, they're about 5 or 6 blocks from each other.

[patriotizzy]

Originally Posted by jtk1519

I disagree with the idea that the design is barren. If anything, from some angles, I think you could make the argument that there is too much going on with the design. I think it's shape and design will actually play off the similarly shaped Wyly Theatre on the other side of Woodall Rodgers.

The design's very modern. I love it.