Visual Arts

Clients get buildings; patrons get architecture. That epigram could stand as Ray Nasher's epitaph as well. He always got architecture, not just because he had money or superb taste, but because paradoxically he knew how to be a great client.

From his own shadowy art villa in North Dallas to NorthPark Center to the Nasher Sculpture Center in the Arts District, he hired the best architects and got the best out of them, quite a feat considering how many third-rate buildings by first-rate talents there are in this part of the world. Even his glass-box office buildings were a cut above, making up in refined proportions and details what they lacked in street corner pizazz.

"I am demanding," he said several years ago. "I write the program, do the interviews, choose the architects. Once construction starts, I go to the site meetings. That's the fun of it. Why do a big project if you don't want to be part of the whole process?"

That, friends will tell you, barely hints at how Mr. Nasher worked. He made decisions slowly, glacially at times, and never met an architectural detail he couldn't worry. He'd spend weeks contemplating the finish of a wall or the angle of a louver, occasionally flying halfway around the world to see a different approach or a better example. He pushed his architects not to repeat themselves, to come up with something new, not because he cared about novelty or fashion as such but because he believed that good architects, like good students and good artists, do their best work when challenged.

"Risk is essential," he explained. "The reason so many buildings look just alike is that most clients don't want to take risks. They want certainty, so they look for what's been done before. I want each project I'm involved in to be a step forward for me, and possibly for architecture."

All of these convictions reached a crescendo when he hired Renzo Piano and Peter Walker to design the Nasher Sculpture Center. Internationally renowned, extraordinarily talented, they were perfectly reasonable fellows until somebody said no. Then the sparks flew.

"Sopranos," Mr. Nasher called them, of the operatic rather than the television variety.

Not cowed by celebrity and unafraid to push back, he showed that he could match high C's with both of them. He made Mr. Walker redesign the sculpture garden from scratch and sent Mr. Piano back to the drawing board three times before he saw a building he liked.

"A tough but exciting collaboration," is how he described it; architectural mud wrestling is how others saw it.

But the results speak for themselves. The Nasher Sculpture Center is one of Mr. Piano's simplest and most poetic designs, while Mr. Walker's garden ranks among his finest landscape achievements. Just compare it with his Burnett Park in downtown Fort Worth: one is a cerebral diagram, the other an inviting place to be.

"I'm not looking for the most contemporary design," Mr. Nasher said before the opening in 2003, "but for something that will be as important 100 years from now as it is today."

That's the patron speaking. Hard-nosed businessman that he was, Mr. Nasher liked to take the long view. He thought much recent Dallas architecture was "trashy," built for the fast buck and the quick exit; he wanted to build a piece of the city that people could enjoy for decades to come.

With the Nasher Sculpture Center he succeeded brilliantly. It is civic patronage of an old-fashioned kind: a gift built to last, with no strings attached.

David Dillon is an architecture writer in Amherst, Mass., who knew Mr. Nasher for 25 years.

The family will hold a memorial service at 10 a.m. Monday at Temple Emanu-El.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests contributions to the "entities Ray felt so passionately about." They include the Nasher Family Cancer Research Fund at UT Southwestern Medical School, the Nasher Forum at Temple Emanu-El and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, N.C.