Daniel Kiley Dallas Museum of Art Daniel Kiley Chica

In the 1970s Dallas initiated plans to create a centralized downtown arts district, which would consolidate the city's art and cultural institutions and assist revitalize the downtown core. The 68-acre Dallas Arts Commune, located next to the urban center'southward business district, was laid out by the landscape architecture firm of Sasaki Assembly.

Modernist architect Edward Larrabee Barnes was hired to create a world-course museum that could hold the city's growing art collection. Collaborating with Dan Kiley as landscape architect for the project, his pattern for the Dallas Museum of Art, which opened in 1984, would take the form of a simple rectilinear building with a barrel vaulted roof, faced with Indiana limestone. Kiley-Walker was hired to create planting plans for the space, including the streetscape and museum entry courtroom, interior courtyards, an next parking area and the outdoor sculpture garden.  Kiley wrote of the projection: "For us, setting a stage for art was equally crucial equally the pieces themselves." [1]

Upon budgeted the museum, Kiley's hand tin be seen immediately in the design for the belongings'due south perimeter. Every bit in many of his designs, Kiley's mural creates a dialogue with the architecture. His uncomplicated palette uses backyard, water, trees and ivy to enliven the building's restrained limestone façade. Rows of copse provide an edge between the building and adjacent roadway. A square recessed courtyard provides a formal entry to the building. Kiley's entry design is both simple and elegant – a circular fountain at its center and four alive oak trees in square beds, one at each corner of the court.

Upon entering the museum, visitors gain access to three interior courtyards: the Tribal Court, Dining Court and Wisteria Court. Kiley'due south unproblematic designs for these spaces create tranquility places for contemplation. Adjacent to the museum edifice, Barnes designed an outdoor sculpture garden that he enclosed with an 8-pes high limestone wall. The entry to the Sculpture Courtroom from the museum is defined past a long nine-foot x 37-foot rectangular puddle of h2o, at the head of which sits a sculpture by Ellsworth Kelly. Four planting beds edge this space, which opens out onto a larger foursquare courtyard, broken up into six individual garden rooms past three ten-foot high h2o walls designed by Alistair Bevington, an architect with Barnes' house. At the base of each wall is a narrow rill, which serves as a catchment basin. Each rill is L-shaped creating a further sectionalisation between the rooms while assuasive for sheltered views that draw visitors through the site. Stepped pyramidal planting beds contain groundcover of Asian jasmine and vinca, ready beneath bosques of live oak trees. English language ivy is planted to creep upward the limestone walls, while seasonal bulb displays add together a playfulness to the garden. Moveable seating allows the space to exist used for larger events and provides a resting place for tired museum visitors.

¹ Kiley, Dan and Jane Amidon, Dan Kiley: The Consummate Works of America'south Master Landscape Builder (Boston, New York, London: Little, Brown and Company, 1999), 94.

Gary Hilderbrand, FASLA, 2013

Edward Larrabee Barnes' 1983 Dallas Museum of Fine art contains something like nine public entrances—an organizational chaos that goes confronting conventions for museum access and security. Barnes made sense of all these perforations by attaching them all to a unmarried broad corridor, the Concourse, which brings clarity to the edifice's north/south organization. By contrast, the routes through the Museum'due south brandish spaces lack this straightforwardness. While the collections are truly distinguished, travel through the galleries can exist indirect, meandering, and even confusing.

Movement through the Sculpture Garden is also purposefully indirect. Designed by Kiley with architect Alistair Bevington from the Barnes function, a massive concrete wall conceals the garden's presence on Ross Avenue. A single open up-grate steel gate provides a straight-on view of ten vertical feet of rushing water inside the garden. Upon entry, the water wall occludes your destination: Neither left nor right offers a articulate itinerary. To notice the museum archway, you lot will meander through courts, channels, sculptures, and groves of Live Oak trees.

The DMA's garden remains for me ane of the great examples of a well-known modernist conceit: the want to interpret the balanced calm of an abstracted not-directional field into a compelling three-dimensional spatial realm. Transforming these ideals from painting to landscape infinite often results in tiresome disorder and ambivalence, but when information technology works, information technology's hugely satisfying. In a scheme like this, the devices that shape movement and seeing are not deterministic, not directed, not linear; low-cal and shadow and audio guide your experience. It'south similar wandering through one of Paul Klee's deftly warped grids—the kind overlain with color and design of varying intensities. At the DMA, information technology works beautifully, partly because the precise aqueduct of water threading through the center of the scheme gives you a momentary glimpse of the whole without revealing everything. And Kiley's bunches of Live Oaks remind me of the native Oak colonies all over eastern Texas; the trees abound improbably close together, their branches merging into a continuous dark mass of evergreen awning. Repeated in three triangular and four rectangular grids against the backdrop of Bevington's tall walls, Kiley'due south trees have evolved a landscape character that cools the body, charges the memory, and propels you, ever slowly, to the ninth set of doors. Another kind of art lies across.

 Landscape Voice. "Dallas Museum of Fine art Garden," http://landscapevoice.com/dallas-museum-of-art-garden/.

The Dallas Arts District. "Compages: Dallas Museum of Art," http://world wide web.thedallasartsdistrict.org/district/fine art-in-compages/architecture.

The Cultural Landscape Foundation. "What's Out There:Dallas Museum of Art," http://tclf.org/landscapes/dallas-museum-fine art.

Kiley, Dan and Jane Amidon. Dan Kiley: The Complete Works of America'southward Chief Landscape Architect (Boston, New York, London: Piffling, Brown and Company, 1999), 94-97.

"Dan Kiley: Landscape Design II." Process: Compages 108. (Tokyo: Japan, Process Architecture Publishing Co., 1993), 91-93.

Plan courtesy Jane Amidon from the Office of Dan Kiley.

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Source: https://www.tclf.org/sites/default/files/microsites/kiley-legacy/DallasMuseum.html

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