How do you grab the attention of motorists hurtling along on their evening commute in an auto-centric city like Dallas? How about creating an enigmatic sequence of intense colored light reflecting out toward the expressway from behind the window wall of an adjacent office building? This is the concept behind the new Dallas Center for Architecture (DCfA). A more difficult question to answer is: How to pull it off?
When their collaborative scheme was selected in a competition for the DCfA offices in February 2008, Peter Doncaster, AIA, of Booziotis & Co. in Dallas; Nicholas Marshall, AIA, of nodesign in New Orleans; and Gabriel Smith, AIA, of Thomas Phifer & Partners in New York, wondered just that. “Our concept was that there was an object inside,” says Doncaster. “And we knew we wanted it to light up—but that was it.”
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