Thirty one years and $1 billion after it began, the Dallas Arts District is nearing completion. The October opening of the AT&T Performing Arts Center, featuring an opera house by Foster + Partners and a theater by REX/OMA, capped three decades of committed, if at times confused, planning and building. Add existing museums by Edward Larrabee Barnes and Renzo Piano, a concert hall from I.M. Pei, and a new Arts Magnet high school by Allied Works Architecture and you have one of finest collections of contemporary art and architecture anywhere — less monolithic and overbearing than Lincoln Center, more coherent and accessible than Los Angeles’s Grand Avenue, even with Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. Four Pritzker Prize winners — count ‘em, four! — strut their stuff on Flora Street, the district’s main drag, while a fifth, Thom Mayne, is designing the Perot Museum of Nature and Science a few blocks away. As a concentration of marquee architects, this is hard to top.
The catalyst for this huge investment was a 1978 report by Carr Lynch Associates that called for relocating the city’s major cultural facilities — museum, symphony, and opera — from Fair Park, a beloved but marginalized site in predominantly black South Dallas, to a played-out stretch of car dealerships and parking lots on the northern edge of downtown. The rationale was a mix of cultural ambition, economic desperation, and faintly disguised racism.
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