Performing Arts

Dallas has been waiting nearly three years to see a design for a major new park in the downtown Arts District. Today it finally gets a look, yet Performance Park turns to be more miniature golf course than grand civic space, with water hazards, tiny fairways, everything except the flags for pin placement.

Pichi Chuang / DMN

Model of the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts

This is not yet the compelling public place that the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts has been touting, and that the center needs to tie itself together. It is still a potpourri of discrete elements in search of a larger idea.

Performance Park was designed by French landscape architect Michel Desvigne and JJR of Chicago, another of those transatlantic joint ventures that center officials are so fond of. It covers approximately 10 acres on both sides of Flora Street, between Routh and Crockett. It is pleasant enough in a generic sort of way, containing trees, fountains, reflecting pools and some 20 pocket parks in which to sit, read, sip wine or stare at the clouds. The showpiece is a tall sunscreen extending from the facade of the Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House to the center of the main plaza.

"We wanted it to be a destination unto itself," said the center's president and CEO Bill Lively. "It should be a place where everybody can come and find something they like."

Nice idea for a buffet, not so great for a civic space. The central design question is how the park, and especially the plaza, should respond to the four assertive sculptural buildings around it: the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, with its billowing conoid window; the glass-enclosed red egg of the opera house; the industrial-strength Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre with some of its working parts hanging out; and an expanding and rejuvenated Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.

The last thing that's needed here is another hyperactive art object. The design needs to calm down and provide connective tissue for the glandular architecture around it, not try to make statements.

Right now, the park is overwrought and unresolved, with no clear center, no hierarchy or crisp spatial definition. Space leaks out in all directions, particularly south toward the Wyly Theatre, where it seems to get sucked down the sloping lobby ramp. The links to the arts magnet high school, the populist pulse of the entire district, are equally tenuous; a patch of lawn and not much else. All of this is puzzling considering that Mr. Desvigne lives in Paris, one of the most coherent, precise, disciplined urban landscapes in the world.

There are things to like. Relocating Annette Strauss Artist Square to the northwest corner of the site, between the Meyerson and the Winspear, makes a lot of sense, as does the decision to require opera patrons to enter the building from the plaza instead of the underground parking garage, as in the Meyerson. Currently, pedestrians in the Arts District are usually lost; soon some of them will get out and about on purpose.

The Winspear sunscreen, which seemed clunky and oppressive in earlier drawings, is lighter and more refined; and in the hands of Foster and Partners it will undoubtedly be impeccably detailed, like their celebrated Carre de Nimes in France.

But many other ideas seem warmed over or gratuitous. Dancing fountains have become one of the clichés of corporate architecture. All the decorative paving suggests connections that aren't really there. The center's board is also considering engraving the names of its $1 million donors in the plaza pavement and possibly selling naming rights to some of the pocket parks and water features. This has become a popular fundraising gambit everywhere, the "buck a brick" syndrome, but it doesn't usually produce exemplary design.

And exemplary design is what's called for here. In a few years, the Arts District could have one of the great collections of contemporary architecture in the world, a street of Pritzker Prize winners and American Institute of Architects Gold Medalists, an exclamation point for its efforts to become an international cultural destination. And Performance Park should be every bit as good as the buildings.

This is what the center said it wanted six years ago when it launched its building campaign – a place where landscape and architecture were on an equal footing, complementing and reinforcing one another. Performance Park in its current form is largely residual, created after the buildings were designed instead of in tandem with them. Mr. Desvigne was so slow producing his drawings, and largely invisible in Dallas, that he lost support among board members. If it weren't for JJR, a technically proficient firm that has done virtually all of the heavy production work, they might still be waiting.

The board recently approved the Performance Park design, meaning that it will be the basis for whatever finally gets built along Flora. At the same time, officials caution that it's still a work in progress, open to revision and refinement.

Good. Revise and refine away. Make it simpler, cleaner and quieter, more defined and less eclectic. Enhance connections between buildings and spaces, cut down on the visual spinach. Performance Park is far too important to be an afterthought.

E-mail ddillon@dallasnews.com