Serifs = Eaves

Calaruega Church

At the main entry level, before finally entering the ticketed area of the museum, visitors go through a series of spatial conditions beginning at the glass doors leading from the entry plaza. Upon entering the glass doors, visitors come upon a vestibule that is essentially an air-conditioned version of the exterior entry plaza, girded above by the same concrete panels that cover the exterior walls of the landscaped plinth and the main cubic volume. The glass-ceilinged vestibule, straddling both the interior and exterior of the main cubic volume, serves as a node that connects the museum proper, housed in the cube, with the ancillary public spaces of the museum store and the cafeteria, housed underneath the landscaped plinth swirling around the main cubic volume. Within the perimeter of the main cube, the vestibule melds with the main circulation atrium that runs the full height of the cube, a formal rupture in the main cubic massing of the museum. The atrium is visually open to the sky above through a glass ceiling and views of downtown skyscrapers to the southeast through the glazing that interrupts the otherwise opaque exterior skin of the cube. Underneath the crisscrossing stairs and bridges that appear to mend the rupture above, visitors cross a chasm into a tunnel through the orthogonal service core containing the elevators. From the compression of the tunnel, visitors emerge into the expansive space of the queueing hall, where the visitors turn 180 degrees to find the ticketing counters standing against the solidity of the service core. The queueing hall continues the theme of ambiguity between exterior and interior in the way its undulating ceiling flows past its exterior glazing in such as a way that denies its enclosure, leaving its spatial definition to the footprint of the main cubic volume floating above, yet to be penetrated by the visitor. 

Past the ticket checkpoint of the queueing hall, visitors are invited to finally depart the entry level through the first of three escalators that lead to the exhibition halls. The first escalator is oriented diagonally in plan from the axis of the main cube, going through a funnel that punctures the undulating ceiling of the queueing hall. At the first landing, visitors come upon a glass volume protruding diagonally out of the concrete cube, forcing their downward gaze onto the landscaping below. The second escalator, which runs along the interior of the perimeter skin of the cube, appears to take off from this view of the earth below and into the unknown. The path of travel shifts at the top landing of the second escalator from the interior of the perimeter skin to a glass volume that carries the third and final escalator along the exterior of the cube, expressing diagonal movement on the exterior elevation. In contrast to the previous escalator, the final segment allows unhindered views of downtown skyscrapers and terminates in a slanted glass wall that points to the open sky. At the top of the escalators, visitors can marvel at the stairs and bridges that crisscross the atrium below before proceeding to the exhibition halls.

Having been subjected to the architecturally glorified ritual of entering into the museum experience, visitors direct their attention to the displays in the exhibit halls, housed in the bulk of the cubic volume. The open and straightforward spaces defined only by the walls of the perimeter and the service core allows the exhibits without much competition for attention, not that the engaging exuberance of the exhibits need much help captivating visitors. The vertical stacking and the arrangement of the exhibition zones on each level reflect both chronological and thematic relationships. The top level where the escalators deposit visitors contains exhibits explaining the origins of the universe and prehistoric life, whereas the lowest level contains exhibits presenting today's ecological issues, human life, and technological innovations. The clockwise rotation of the sequence of spaces through the entry level and the escalators reverses at the exhibition spaces, which seem to direct visitors follow a generally counterclockwise rotation around the service core. For instance upon arriving at the top of the escalators, visitors first come upon the Expanding Universe Hall explaining the origins of the universe before the appearance of life, followed on the same level by the T. Boone Pickens Life Then and Now Hall, which features prehistoric life, before coming upon stairs that lead to the Rose Hall of Birds, a mezzanine level overlooking the giant Alamosaurus skeleton that peeks above its guardrails, making a connection between the birds of today and the dinosaurs of yesterday. Visitors return to the atrium to circulate down to the next level, each time allowing the bright light of the sky above and the expansive views of Downtown Dallas to wash over them as a unifying motif in the museum-going experience, reminiscent of the catchy "Promenade" theme stringing together Modest Mussorgsky's meditations on the "Pictures at an Exhibition."

In response to Harvey J. Graft's book The Dallas Myth, Dallas Observer columnist Jim Schutze writes:

The heroic myth of Dallas is that the city is entirely a creation of willpower and salesmaship... a city where the most real things are the things we dream up in our heads... Do you remember the Hale-Bopp people who all killed themselves while in their bunks in California in 1997? ...They committed suicide because they thought the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet was a sign that the Earth was about to be 'recycled.' ...Many of them—on the lam and hiding out from family members, creditors and other interested parties—had lived in North Dallas off and on from the 1980s into the mid-'90s.

Against this backdrop of Dallasites' sober self-understanding and incidental association with cringe-worthy pseudoscience, we examine the Morphosis-designed Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, which opened to the public in 2012. According to Morphopedia, "the overall building mass is conceived as a large cube floating over the site’s landscaped plinth." Without even entering the spatial experiences of the interior, the casual visitor can derive edification from reading the massing and the material treatment of the exterior in relation to the urban context and the program of the nature and science museum.

Within the present cityscape dominated by highways and parking lots, Morphosis constructs a "context" consisting of "an acre of undulating roofscape comprised of rock and native drought-resistant grasses reflects Dallas’s indigenous geology and demonstrates a living system that will evolve naturally over time." Context here is not merely replicated and parodied, but idealized as both a reconstruction of a naturally pristine past and as an exemplar of the city's hope for a more culturally dynamic and a more environmentally sustainable future. The landscaped plinth is wrapped by the same concrete panels that clad the surmounting cube, which arises out of the constructed context as naturally as the no-nonsense big-box stores that pop up among the highways and parking lots of Middle America. Concrete, notorious as the material that helped speed the obliteration of bare earth in the 20th century, here is rendered in a horizontally stridated pattern that mediates between an abstraction of the indigenous limestone formations and a playful interpretation of the exhilirating dynamism of highway traffic zooming by. As the classical architecture that arose under the Mediterannean sun derived much of its expression on surface details casting shadow lines, the vibrance of the stridated concrete panels designed by Morphosis rings most gloriously under the full intensity of the Texas sun. While inferior architectural interventions would shun the perceived lack of context, the stubborn car culture, and the oppressive sunlight, Morphosis celebrates the realities out of which the Perot Museum arises to surprise and delight people with pure architectural wonder while inviting positive change.

Beyond immediate context, the form of the solid cube floating over the wilderness of the landscaped plint stands independently as a symbol for the relationship of science with nature. The cube, readily definable by cartesian coordinates, represents logical and methodical thinking. The platonic solidity of the form embodies the stability of sound scientific thought as people make sense of the complexities of the world around them. Through science, the unpredictable becomes predictable and the unclear made lucid. The landscape swirls whimsically around the cube, ultimately inviting movement into the museum as the wonderful beauty of natural phenomena inspires scientific study. A strong, diagonal glazed volume that expresses vertical circulation appears to take off from the entry plaza in counterpoint to the rigid perpendicularity of the cube, at the same time mending the vertical disruption of the cube's otherwise relentless concrete surface by strategically placed expanses of glass that offer glimpses of the interior and promises museum patrons the luxury of observing from the heights of the cube the landscaped roof below and the city beyond. The building's rich interplay of forms thus conspire as a whole to express the roles of the museum in the study of nature, the conservation of knowledge, and the invitation of the general public to the excitement of learning.

The Perot Museum is an example of great architecture that celebrates its context and facilitates its program while in so doing also illuminating the art of building spaces. As science orders our understanding of the wild complexities of nature, so does great art affirm meaning even where apparently there is nothing to be found. The optimism embodied in the architecture of the Perot Museum is the same energy that fueled the success of real science in sending humans to the moon and that Dallas hopes to inspire its young to reach even farther beyond towards the stars. Jim Schutze concludes his piece with a pithy paean of Dallas suburbanites: