Best Of MODERN in Dallas - edition.05 May 2021

e.5 ‘21

// architect bentley tibbs photo: charles davis smith

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The Architec tural Philoso pher

// university park house - all photos: charles davis smith

by Kendall Morgan

university //// 1900 pearlpark house

A consummate modernist, Bentley Tibbs creates a seamless marriage of structure and site.

The Dallas-based architect has built his reputation over decades for his ability to get in the minds of his clients, extracting the perfect detail to make a home unique to its owner.

And you’ll never see Tibbs construct a faux chateau or mash together Texan and Tuscan. For him, homes should

always be luxurious yet straightforward, seamlessly blending into their site. Mentored by his first boss, the legendary “dean of architecture” Frank Welch, he came away with the same respect for landscape and materials that Welch possessed.

“I think a trap that a lot of people fall into is too many materials. If you can edit your palette down as tightly as you can get it, you get the sense of blurring the lines

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// university park house

between inside and outside,” he explains. “There are multiple connections to the outside world, and the building isn’t just this foreign object inflicted on it. That gives us a sense of calm that decorating can’t do. You’ve got to have these fundamental spaces that allow you to feel at peace, and I think a lot of that peace is having a connection to the natural world.”

farm and building forts in the decrepit barn.

Tibbs started honing his philosophy (however inadvertently) at a very early age. Raised in a small town in the Mississippi Delta, he spent days with his siblings playing on his family’s

Not long afterward, his parents decided to build a Palladian Southern home from the ground up, which helped get Tibbs hooked on art and craft. Seeming 15-foot blocks of

“There were holes in the roof, and everything was filthy and dusty, but the dust and light took form. I saw these columns of light penetrating this building, and I was just mesmerized by the idea of space and light having form and what that could mean.”

// university park house

// university park house

mahogany morph into curved pillars for a self-supporting staircase showed the then 12-year-old how rough wood could become something sublime in the right hands.

Originally intending to study landscape architecture, Tibbs enrolled in Texas A&M, where he soon realized crafting buildings was his forte. Educated by “one of the last staunch modernists,” he embraced the methodology’s sense of craft and purity in design. Post-graduation, he traveled up and down the east coast, cold-calling firms.

Although everyone was willing to interview him, the job offers weren’t coming. He had a couch to crash on in Dallas, so Tibbs decided to give the office of Frank Welch a try.

“I didn’t have an appointment—I just walked in and left my flier with his secretary. He called me the next day and told me to come in. By then, everyone told me who Frank Welch was, and I was terrified! I was showing him my p ictures, and he’s not saying anything, then he walks out of the conference room and is gone a really long time. He came back with pictures of his work and told me to show

Get inspired.

// river house

up on Monday. It was the luckiest thing—professionally and personally—that ever happened to me.”

Tibbs spent five years with the master, absorbing both technical and life lessons. Once he struck out on his own, the two kept up a friendship, meeting for a Shiner Bock and a cheeseburger periodically at the Deep Ellum dive bar Adair’s.

“He was so talented,” Tibbs says of Welch. “He could

teach you more talking about anything other than architecture you could ever learn from a book. It was his way of seeing the world and the importance of beauty and space. That space might be a building, or a painting, or a movie. He just had a way of seeing that was slightly offkilter and really sophisticated without being pretentious.”

Embracing his mentor’s unique view, Tibbs slowly built his client base by putting ads in the Dallas Morning News.

What set him apart from other architects in the field was

// river house

// bluffview house

// hall tower

// signal house

his ability to transform a client’s passions and preferences into a delicate detail in their home. For an urbane woman who casually mentioned her farm girl past, he created a glass-sided abode that made the owner feel like they were living outside. For a couple at odds over the husband’s passion for red, he inserted a minimalist column of oxblood that added the subtlest pop of color to an otherwise neutral façade.

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“Often, the best part of a house in all the interviews and meetings is someone will randomly say something in passing, and for whatever reason, it sticks in my head. I // signal house

// university park house

// bluffview house

don’t make a big deal out of it, but I find a way to get it into a building, whether it’s a spatial thing or a material thing or a view in one direction.”

However his structures may evolve, the beauty the architect finds in surfaces is the thread that ties all of his work together and makes it uniquely Bentley Tibbs.

Clients often come in with binders stuffed full of images of their dream home, but Tibbs prefers to discuss how they want their future residence to feel instead. “They’ve got to see that their feelings and thoughts are more important than what they clip out of magazines,” he explains. “And also, to get them to realize the lot they bought is going to have as much of an opinion as the client is, and sometimes the land is going to win,” he laughs.

“The lines and spaces (in my) buildings are very streamlined, but they create an environment that is rich and beautiful, and you just want to drown in it all. There’s a lushness in how the wall meets a ceiling or a floor. Nothing is ever decorated but put together; it reads as this quietly powerful thing.” bentleytibbsarchitect.com

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// triangles (this little ring of mine), 2021wool knitting on poplar wood construction 18h x 16w x 6d in

GEOMETRY

SACRED

by Kendall Morgan

// installation view photo kevin todora

Dallas artist Rusty Scruby finds the perfect synthesis between the line and the shape.

Known for three-dimensional pieces created from family snapshots or playing cards, the Dallas-based Scruby has expanded his oeuvre to create boundary-pushing work in a brand-new medium. His current show “Comfort” at Cris Worley blends knitwear’s craft with the artist’s passion for pattern theory and mathematics.

“Knitting has been in the background my whole life and has

informed my structure and process, and but this first time it’s come out front,” the artist explains. “It’s kind of a struggle, but it’s a pleasurable struggle. It’s really because of my mom and dad—I can identify so much with each of them.

Knitting is the feminine aspect versus the wood structure underneath, which is masculine. I don’t want to say they’re fighting, but I am trying to find an equilibrium.”

Having spent his early years on the isolated atoll of Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, he was influenced by both of his teacher parents. His mom’s expansive collection of

// midnight, 2021 wool knitting on poplar wood construction 18h x 16w x 6d in

PASSAGE

an online magazine of visions and voices passagevision.com

Clockwise from top left: Malcolm Bucknall, Eve, 2021, oil on panel, 15 x 14 inches. Penny Cerling, 2020: A Study of Lignin in Four Parts: Function/Structure: Transportation, pen & ink and oil on wood, 24 x 24 inches.

Alejandro Abarca, 8-Ball #2, Austin, Texas, September 12, 2020. Ellen Berman, Bowl, 2016, oil on board, 12 x 12 inches.

// gray net, 2021 wool knitting on poplar wood construction 18h x 16w x 6d in

craft supplies provided fodder for afternoons of creative play, while his dad’s mathematics textbooks inspired him to explore angles and surfaces.

“Even though he was teaching high school and I was in grade school, I was still looking at his books and getting inspired by the pictures,” Scruby says. “I was always building 3D geometric shapes and playing with geometry.”

Scruby’s parents returned to the United States after a few

years, landing in Oregon. Post-graduation, he had decided to pursue a career in aerospace engineering. Choosing Texas A&M because of its engineering school, his creative side soon overtook the analytical.

The life of an engineer didn’t sound as appealing as creating my own path,” he recalls. “I first went into music composition because I’d been playing my whole life. I started taking piano lessons again, and I started writing, and that took over. All my notebooks from my classes have music scores

// installation view photo kevin todora

in them because I’m working out ideas instead of listening to lectures.”

Scruby transferred to the University of North Texas to study music composition, ultimately leaving college altogether to pursue fine art. Apprenticing with a local marble sculptor and taking life drawing classes in his spare time, he taught himself by trial and error, ultimately landing on his unique aesthetic.

“There are advantages to learning to do it yourself—you come up with solutions, and it can help your process,” says Scruby. “At first, I started drawing little repeating windows of a picture, and just because of the amount of time it took—even though I loved drawing and I loved painting —I couldn’t realize so many of my ideas. It took too long to do a small piece. So, I started using the computer and repeating drawings. I go back between 2D and 3D, but they’re basically the same (method) of creating this interlocking, slowly shifting image.”

// perimeter, 2021 wool knitting on poplar wood construction 18h x 16w x 6d in

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// installation view photo kevin todora

Influenced by his musical training, Scruby found the ratio that leads from discord to harmony was an abstract concept he could harness in his finished works.

ton, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia, Santa Fe, and Seoul, Korea. For nearly two decades, Scruby has shown in Dallas exclusively at Worley’s space.

“I started working with repetition and creating a visual frequency. The amount of blur I put into a piece was on a scale, and I was trying to pinpoint when certain harmonies would happen. It was an investigation in trying to come up with a visual language.”

Scruby had already been working with wood structures, hand-painting, and spraying imagery on the final product.

In his spare time, he knitted, and a series of “pussy hats” he created for female friends protesting after the Trump inauguration in 2017 led him to explore different techniques.

Describing his technique as “an intellectual game,” the harmonious work that emerged grew the artist’s reputation. He garnered exhibitions in Chicago, Hous-

paolo roversi - audrey, 1996 I did this little Twitter // bird on one of them thatparis got me focused on it. I stopped for a year; then, the pandemic brought it back. I’ve been knitted for about a year and a half solidly

// aqua rose, 2021 wool knitting on poplar wood construction 18h x 16w x 6d in

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every day. It feels like it has so much integrity to it because I’ve been doing it all my life. In this locked-down situation, I needed to find new structure and productivity, and comfort at the same time. I felt I’d been set free.”

Scruby first uses his computer to create a geometric breakdown he can distill into flat sections that become the puzzle pieces that make up a final work. He then knits tripod shapes in neutral hues or vivid stripes. Seamed together to create a solid cover, he laces them onto the wooden structures he calls “cube networks.” These complex honeycombs will eventually hang on a gallery wall.

Hard and soft, heavy and light, natural and manmade, complex yet soothing to view—each sculptural piece has a dichotomy pleasing to the eye and tempting to the touch.

As the artist is exploring his methodology, he feels like he’s at the beginning of an exciting new process. And, whatever the future holds, Scruby certainly won’t be putting down his knitting needles anytime soon.

“I’ve been trying to figure out how to go BIG,” he laughs. “I do like this intimate thing, but then there some ideas where there’s not enough room in a small piece. I’ve been thinking about how to create a larger structure without making it massively heavy. I’d like to do cabling stitches that are bigger and chunkier or lacy stitches that might reference sweaters my grandmother would wear or create intarsia patterns that inspired me in the ‘70s or ‘80s. I feel like I’ve just gotten started.”

“Comfort” is on view at Cris Worley Fine Arts through June 19, 2021.

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// national interior - photo: gustav schmiege

THE

THOMPSON

DALLAS

by Hardy Haberman

The 51 story landmark skyscraper once known as the First National Bank building is now known as The National, and has been transformed into luxury residences and the Thompson Dallas Hotel. It was one of the most costly transformations in Dallas history and it shows. Designed by renowned architects George Dahl and Thomas Stanley the building was once the tallest skyscraper in Texas and soon became a Dallas icon. The new redesign retained much of the original building’s clean modern international style while making it very accessible both physically and esthetically.

The Thompson Dallas retains a great deal of the white marble from the former bank, with broad white surfaces interspersed with carefully curated artwork and furnishings that bring a distinctive new and inviting look. There are lots of intimate spaces in the lobby that would be perfect for casual business or social meetings. The space is delineated with shelves and distinctive objects creating an ambience that is cozy without feeling claustrophobic.

One of the most inviting features of the hotel is the ninth floor. Once reserved for bank executives, the entire floor and the surrounding 2 acre rooftop terrace has become a collection of restaurants and

// catbird private lounge - photo: gustav schmiege

mod.artists gallery

judith seay | celebration, acylic on canvas 36 x 48 inches

// catbird double booths - photo: gustav schmiege

meeting rooms as well as a spectacular roof garden and sun deck with a glass-walled swimming pool. The ninth floor also houses the health club and boutique spa for both the hotel and residences.

Dining at the Thompson/National is what you would expect at a world class facility. I had lunch at Nine at the National, a casual restaurant that overlooks the swimming pool.

The fare is simple with chef inspired touches. My French Dip sandwich was stuffed with shaved roast beef and

topped with a mild horseradish cream sauce that didn’t disappoint. The au jus was hot and tasty without being overly salty, a common misstep.

Just above Nine is Catbird. With a large rooftop terrace this cozy spot is a perfect place for late night drinks, a casual dinner or just a relaxed happy hour.

Fine dining opportunities are located at the top of the National on the 49th and 50th floors where there are two

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// nine - damien hirst + stephen wilson - photo: gustav schmiege

// nine bar - photo: gustav schmiege

new restaurants from the culinary minds of Michelin star chef, Danny Grant and What If Syndicate. Monarch on the 49th features wood-fired Italian cuisine and a panoramic fire of the city with floor to ceiling windows. Meanwhile on the 50th floor, the former observation deck of the building, Kessaku is a Japanese lounge with sushi and sake as well as Japanese whiskies.

The hotel accommodations are also something special, offering 219 rooms with 52 suites, all with large windows and offer wonderful cityscape views. The rooms are spacious and are decorated with rich leather sofas and polished wood. The Thompson Dallas did not spare the amenities either. Baths are generous and stocked with D.S. & Durga bath products, hair dryers and bathrobes.

// david bates artwork in lobby - photo: gustav schmiege

// double room - photo: julie soefer

There are ADA accessible rooms in all sizes from double queen beds to king-sized suites. With roll-in showers and lowered thermostats and light controls the Thompson Dallas shows that it takes accessibility seriously.

For a spectacular stay, the penthouse suite is a whopping 2269 sq. feet it has sweeping, city views through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The suite offers one king bed, a separate living room, a fireplace, modern bath with

step-in rain shower, and a guest bathroom in the parlor.

For special events the Thompson Dallas has the National Ballroom. The spectacularly appointed ballroom offers flexible floor plans able to accommodate events of any scale. It is surrounded with 20-foot floor to ceiling windows and panoramic views of Dallas. Special events are complimented by a best-in-class culinary experience and an expert on-site event staff.

The Thompson Dallas Hotel is worth a visit even if you are a Dallasite. It’s heartening to see how one of the city’s most well known buildings had been transformed into a delightful urban mixeduse facility while retaining the mid-century modern character.

The Thompson Dallas at The National is located at the corner of North Akard and Elm Streets in downtown Dallas. visit: Thompson Dallas

// thompson terrace - photo: gustav schmiege

CADDALLAS.ORG 2020 MEMBERS 500X Gallery Carneal Simmons Contemporary Art Conduit Gallery Craighead Green Gallery Cris Worley Fine Arts Erin Cluley Gallery Ex Ovo Gallery Galleri Urbane Marfa+Dallas Holly Johnson Gallery Kirk Hopper Fine Art PDNB Gallery RO2 Art Talley Dunn Gallery Valley House Gallery & Sculpture Garden

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your modern

calendar

Modern events and activities make for fall fun around the Metroplex.

Alan Ricks - MASS Design Group The Dallas Architecture Forum // june02

Fair Park Tram Tour Ad Ex // june16

Walking Tours Discover the Arts District + Explore the Main Street District Ad Ex

Virtual Tour - The Fight for Civil Rights in the South Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum

Nasher Public - Jer’Lisa Devezin Nasher Sculpture Center

Cubism in Color: The Still Lifes of Juan Gris Dallas Museum Of Art

Milton Avery Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

modern

art galleries

Modern art, exhibits, around the Metroplex.

Charles Mary Kubricht Kirk Hopper Fine Art

Rusty Scruby Cris Worley Fine Arts

Joey Brock + Kelsey Anne Heimerman Janette Kennedy Gallery

Jules Buck Jones + Marco Querin + Cindy Johnston Conduit Gallery

Matthew Cusick Holly Johnson Gallery

Paul Abbott + James Allumbaugh + Nikola Olic Museum of Geometric and MADI Art

Allison Gildersleeve Valley House Gallery

Benjamin Terry + Meghan Borah Galleri Urbane

Sam Revels Talley Dunn Gallery // view current shows online or appointments maybe available