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Fort Worth, Texas
In the motions and the things you say, it all will fall, fall right into place
If it is March and I am in Dallas, it is for one of two reasons only. Either I am there to watch a hockey game (not this time) or I am there because of work (which is why I am there this time). I have been to Dallas before (it’s a lot nicer in March than in August), and I have been there enough that if I have limited time, there is already a shortlist in my head of things I want to do. There are a lot of great food choices- In-N-Out Burger, Waffle House, Sonny Bryan’s, and a lot of great museums to see. But if I’m talking about a straight up architectural pilgrimage visit, there is one clear winner and it isn’t even in Dallas. Welcome to Fort Worth’s own Kimbell Museum, designed by legendary architect and bigamist Louis Kahn.
Why do I like the Kimbell so much? Well to start, it’s free (i can be cheap sometimes) and easy to get to (I can also be scared off by hard to get to places sometimes). And even as you approach it from the outside, you start to get sucked into the design, a series of curved vaults (is there even such a thing as non-curved vaults?), and once inside they absolutely glow. I’m sure there’s art inside to, but I’m there for the building and I’m there for the vaults.
Like all popular museums, the Kimbell just had to expand, and since Louis Kahn is dead and has no successor (although an argument might be made in favor of Moshie Safdie), they chose instead Renzo Piano. Piano is super talented and has developed a skillset of designing museums and museum additions, although some of the elements and ideas start to repeat themselves. The High Museum, the Whitney, LACMA, the High Museum, the California Academy of Sciences and whatever that museum at Harvard is called now join the Kimbell addition, definitely not as twins but more as first cousins.
The quality of the new Kimbell is unmistakable, and if I was not already very familiar with Renzo Piano’s museum addition work, I probably would have walked away with far more positive feelings. But knowing what I know, it really feels like a safe building added to a building that was never safe to begin with.
The Kimbell addition is not attached to the existing museum, it sits across a lawn and generally minds its own business. Once inside the addition, you feel spaces and (especially) courtyards that remind you of the original Louis Kahn building. Again, it’s very nice, it’s just that, well, I wish it was something else.
From Fort Worth, we’re headed to College Point in Queens for a tour of the New York Times printing facility designed by James Stewart Polshek- you know the big blue building off the Whitestone Expressway that has a big sign that says “The New York Times” on it. The tour inside was super fascinating and felt like a throwback to a different time deep in the past. It’s crazy that they still print newspapers this way, with giant complicated machines and pieces of glass with the actual copy on it. The tour was run by the good people at Open House New York, who manage to always find something interesting for me to see that I’ve never seen before.
And speaking of things I’ve never seen before, we’re back to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park in Maine where even though I think I’ve seen everything, there is always something a little different than the last time, or the time before that, or the time before that. In the last 30 plus years, I have been here, I don’t know, let’s say 20 plus times. And I hope to be back again to drive the same roads, walk the same trails, climb the same mountains, kill time at the same lakes and coves and forests, always expecting to see something I somehow missed all those times before.
