Plaudits All but Ignored Laureate

The investiture of Kenzo Tange as the 1987 laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize took place earlier this month at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Tex. The event was both memorable and embarrassing.

Making it memorable was the museum designed by Louis Kahn. Completed in 1972, it was Kahn’s last major project in a distinguished career that included the designs of the Bangladesh capitol building in Dacca and the Salk Institute in La Jolla.

The museum is composed of a series of seemingly free-standing barrel-vaulted bays, slightly pulled apart at their apex to allow natural light to be filtered in. The effect on the flowing galleries below is quite dramatic.

Arguably, the Kimbell is one of the world’s great architectural landmarks and Kahn, who died in 1974, a seminal figure in American architecture.

Having the investiture at the museum was a nice gesture. With its $100,000 tax-free grant and accompanying sculpture and recognition, the Pritzker in its relatively short, nine-year history has become the architecture profession’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, and should be bestowed in an appropriate landmark setting.

What was embarrassing was that the evening’s speakers did not let you forget it. What was supposed to be a ceremony honoring Tange turned into a testimonial for Kahn and the prize. The 73-year-old renowned and prolific Tange, the first Japanese architect to win a Pritzker, deserved better.

But there was Kimbell’s Edmund Pillsbury running on and on about the museum, asking those who had been connected with its funding and construction to take a bow, and quoting a comment of praise for the design made by Arata Isozaki, a former student of Tange’s who of late has competed with him for select commissions.

Pillsbury was followed by J. Carter Brown of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the chairman of the Pritzker jury, who also talked about the Kimbell, Kahn and himself. And though entertaining, the eloquent, self-effacing remarks by New Yorker writer Brendan Gill, the secretary to the jury, were not particularly pertinent.

The next speaker was Jay Pritzker, whose family of Hyatt Hotel fame, sponsors the prize. After praising the Kimbell and Kahn, and expressing the regret that the prize had not been established when Kahn was still alive, Pritzker finally got around to addressing Tange.

And while Pritzker’s brief comments describing Tange as a gifted designer were welcome, they were diluted by the praise for Kahn and, worse, for the Pritzker jury and the prize itself.

One felt relieved when at last Pritzker introduced Tange and presented him with the new symbol of the award, a sculpture piece fashioned out of a decorative medallion created by Louis Sullivan nearly a century ago for an ornament on a building he designed.

Tange graciously accepted the award and, apparently sensing the drift of the evening, discarded his prepared remarks and reminisced about his abbreviated relationship with Kahn. Then came a banquet. Unlike the ceremony, the food served was not “mazui, “ Japanese for distasteful, or in bad taste.

Attending the affair gave me an opportunity to take a look at neighboring Dallas, which in the dozen years since I had last seen it, has experienced one of the nation’s more robust building booms. Driving into Dallas from the airport, I felt I had gone 1,500 or so miles from Los Angeles, only to end up in Orange County, albeit without the ocean to the west and the mountains to the east.

Along the freeway are a variety of singular structures, most of them standing like sore thumbs in a suburban sprawl. Among the few interesting ones is Paul Rudolph’s geometric Brookhollow Plaza, topped by a distinctive flying horse symbol, and a glistening white mock version of the Victorian Crystal Palace, designed by Martin Growald as a computer mart.

And then, looming up at the seemingly end of the freeway, like a huge architectural hatrack on a prairie, is downtown. There in the evening, select high rises are artfully lit to create a striking stage set of a city.

In the harsh Texas sun, the scene is less successful, with various buildings of various styles dueling with one another to gain center stage.

Among the more successful new stars is the LTV Tower by the Houston office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, a dark-toned granite and glass concoction that rises in a series of graceful setbacks to a pyramidal top, and the Mercantile Financial Center, a red-granite and glass tower with a vaulted top designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee.

Cutting a rakish figure is the Modernist-styled Arco Tower, a sleek gray-granite and glass office structure designed by I. M. Pei and Henry Cobb. In contrast, the Dallas City Hall designed by Pei, and featuring a heavy reverse slope facade of masonry and glass appears brutish and awkward, tripping over itself and the plaza in front of it.

In a lesser role but making the most of it by dressing in a well-detailed French chateau-style is Johnson and Burgee’s design of the Crescent, an ambitious and eye-catching, if overblown office, retail and hotel complex on the edge of downtown.

But for me, the new star of downtown Dallas is its Museum of Art, designed by Edward Larrabee. Its exterior marked by a limestone-covered barrel vault might be a bit bland, but the interior serves the art and the viewer exceptionally well in a variety of spaces linked by a seemingly effortless circulation system. For diversion, there is a marvelous sculpture garden.

The museum, along with a concert hall, designed by Pei and now under construction, are critical elements in a planned arts district, one of a few redevelopment projects the city hopes will breathe new life in and around downtown.

Another project involves an area known as the Deep Ellum, where an artist colony is slowly setting down roots. This is a healthy sign in a city suffering a severe recession brought on in part by excessive development.

It appears that Dallas is beginning realize that there is more to a city than a skyline, and that more attention needs to be paid to smaller-scaled projects that address streetscapes and the quality of life.