// domiteaux garza architecture
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a year in review
Dallas has grown with an abundance of modern design spread across the city from homes to highrises and preserving of important spaces, the arts have played a significant role with outstanding exhibits in the galleries and museums. Let’s take a look back at 2024.
WINTER
Sunscout Studio, the design firm of Greg and Chantal Hickman, a husband and wife team that specialize in breathing new life into old spaces.
// sunscout studio, greg and chantal hickman
// photographer charles davis smith
// empty panties” andrea carvalho
Dallas photographer Charles Davis Smith celebrates the architectural experience. His training as an architect allows him to approach his imagery through no less than nine principle tenets of design.
With “Empty Panties” Andrea Carvalho makes a similar proposition with the landscape of the body that relies on
the connotations of the display rather than the display itself at Kirk Hopper Fine Art.
SPRING
Cliff Welch, Much of the joy in life is found in surprise and well into his career in architecture, he was commissioned
New Year, New Home
to build a home just east of White Rock Lake on Wyatt Circle.
Robyn Menter does not typically use color. She likes to keep things simple, but impactful. She chose a long curving couch with plush feel in a brilliant blue, “the texture, it’s
kind of a velvet texture, and it just works beautifully in the space.”
Valley House Gallery is celebrating its seventieth anniversary this year, Kevin and his wife Cheryl took on the stewardship of the gallery around 1982 and how the gallery
// robyn menter desgin associates
has managed to continue to exist as one of Dallas’ most cherished art institutions.
The spirit remains, the architectural and cultural heritage of Ron Wommack. “Most modernism is off-putting, but (Ron’s) modernism is warm. It’s like a handshake.” Max Levy would certainly know, he was a former colleague and
// autohaus | mfarchitecture
// architect ron wommack
more importantly, a friend of forty years.
Glenn Bonick, owner and founder of Bonick Landscaping, has been shaping the outdoors of Dallas for over forty years, I don’t really think of myself as a great designer. I’m a great collaborator, and I love bringing ideas to life.
Utterly unique, in every way it can be the work of Otis Jones is utterly unique. Jones’ paintings are not simply paintings. They are from the frames to the front complete works.
FALL
// bonick lanscaping
// otis jones at barry whistler gallery | photo: allison v smith
If there’s one thing you can always expect from a Bernbaum/Magadini home, it’s that it will have a magnificent front entry.
Bark + Build Design/Build Competiton at Northpark Mall is designed to benefit the SPCA of Texas. (the end)
// bark + build design build competiton
Conduit Gallery
Craighead Green Gallery
Cris Worley Fine Arts
Erin Cluley Gallery
Galleri Urbane
Holly Johnson Gallery
James Harris Gallery
Keijsers Koning
Laura Rathe Fine Art
Meliksetian | Briggs
PDNB Gallery
Pencil on Paper Gallery
RO2 Art
Valley House Gallery & Sculpture Garden
Meow Wolf The Real Unreal
by Todd Camplin
The arts and entertainment company Meow Wolf has a Grapevine location and is known as The Real Unreal. A year and a half after it opened, it was pretty crowded midday on a weekend. The Meow Wolf complex is located next to a mall in Grapevine. The outside instantly beckons you to come inside with fun art and wildly dressed greeters. After a brief security check, I began my first visit to this event/art space.
Immersive spaces have exploded in the last ten years,
but they are rooted in a long tradition. Robert Barker’s late 1700s 360-degree panoramic painting wowed audiences. Disneyland Imagineers invented rides that told a story while giving you many visual images and objects to marvel at. Art installations and art happenings were innovated by Kurt Schwitter and later, Allan Kaprow. However, the audience and number of collaborating artists were limited. Luna Luna, a carnival created by Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Hockey, Roy Lichtenstein, and others has resurfaced from storage. So, Meow Wolf
// making love to the camera, paint, wood, and glue, 21 x 16”
comes from a rich tradition. The company has drawn its ideas from inside and out of the art world. Meow Wolf is not a reaction to the Instagramable moment, but rather predicted the cultural explosion of sharing images.
Before I walked in the door, I had a goal in mind. I wanted to see the artwork by Adam Palmer. He was among forty local artists included in the space. Few of them have been featured in Modern Dallas articles. Palmer
had two dioramas filled with his small cartoon figures painted on wood cutouts. The work harkens back to the early 20th-century style of Disney or Max Fleischmann cartoons. Meow Wolf sought out local artists to be included in the installation. In an interview with Adam Palmer, he described the collaboration as a positive experience. The artists are paid and keep the rights to the images they make. He said Meow Wolf didn’t micromanage the artists but trusted their visions for the
// you and
i are earth, paint, wood, and glue, 21 x 15”
// pardoned sins, paint, wood, and glue, 21 x 16”
space. He was even allowed to curate the type of lighting that interacted with his pieces. I was impressed with the company’s professionalism toward their collaboration with the artists. It sounds like they kept the creative spirit that spawned their first space in Santa Fe.
After finding Adam Palmer’s work, located next to the payphone, I went exploring to find other artists’ works. Dan Lam had her iconic colorful drippiness. I think I saw a Zeke Williams piece, and a Ricardo Paniague piece,
but I am not sure. Carlos DonJuan must be the artist who painted the cartoony pop sickles. No museum-style identifying markers are available, so you have to do your research before you go and try to find the artists.
If you’re into solving mysteries, there is a story element you can follow. Unfortunately, I was so overwhelmed with guessing how things were made that I skipped the story element. It looked engaging and I might want to return at a quieter time. The space was filled with so
// ambling, paint, wood, and glue,
21 x 16”
many people. I didn’t linger as long as I wanted to out of courtesy to people behind me. Maybe next time I will try the middle of the week. The space also has a wonderful gift shop that has objects for sale which relate to the story inside the space. Also, I saw some creative food and drink choices available. Overall, the experience is one that I would like to repeat. I look forward to approaching the space from a different angle next time.
Maybe play in the narrative or find a place to sit down
longer and do some sketching. Whatever reason strikes me, I must go again.
In case you are interested, Adam Palmer has a new body of work that will be featured this summer at RO2 Gallery in Dallas. I think you will be surprised how his work has evolved over a year and a half since in Meow Wolf installation.
// meowwolf.com
Engage Educate Experience Enjoy
The Dallas Architecture Forum is for everyone who wants to experience inspired design. The Forum presents an award-winning Lecture Series that brings outstanding architects,interior designers, landscape architects and urban planners from around the world, as well as Symposia, Receptions at architecturally significant residences, and Panel Discussions on issues impacting North Texas.
J. Clairborne Bowdon
Living History by
The webpage for Omniplan’s case study of the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum begins with a question- “How can a building educate and change the world?”
The homepage of the Museum itself seems to answer it:
“It’s about humanity. Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow.” Omniplan is an architecture firm that has been shaping Dallas for over 60 years with private and public architecture projects, but something of this emotional and historical magnitude is a rare and deep responsibility. How does a building contend with the pain of confronting the atrocities of the Holocaust? It works to demonstrate both the
profound human toll of doing nothing when everything is at stake, and the hope that lashes against it when those that are not in harm’s way willingly put themselves in it for the sake of others.
The permanent exhibit is an experience- one that shapes the building itself and you as you pass through it. You begin with an orientation. The doors swing open automatically to a theater based on a timetable. You enter into a minimalist gray room with simple wooden benches. This room prepares you to understand and confront ev-
erything that proceeds from it in terms of the historical weight of what you’ll confront, and the visual aesthetics of the building. The minimalism is a timeless approach to the look of the interior, but it’s also an intentional gesture to put what the building offers at the forefront.
The way the first two rooms operate is also useful in how it puts you in a frame of mind to truly understand everything that will proceed it, though likely unintentional in some
respects; the automated nature of the doors that allow you into the theater, and then into the stairwell, give you the feeling of being at the mercy of an abstract force that you cannot control. Once you enter the stairwell from the theater you are shown a diorama of the beginning of the Jewish faith. From there lights and a voice entreat you to move up the stairs to the next landing, where the history of the Jews continue. Once you reach the third landing a video outlines the roots of the hatred and the stereotypes
that have shaped the destiny of a people for thousands of years. You then proceed to a door where Hitler’s voice booms on the other side.
Once you pass through the door you’re confronted with the beginning of the Nazis. Everything is organized on a timeline from these moments and everything, in every corner of the world involved or touched by Nazis, is presented
as you proceed through the halls of the timeline of the Holocaust. Placards and entire walls list each progression that would lead to the creation of the concentration and death camps, and the testimonies of those that experienced each of them are available to watch on video screens with personal earphones so that they can tell you their stories. The transition from the theater to the stairs to these hallways is a more obvious change in levels, but as
you move from one part of the exhibit to another there are more subtle shifts in elevation. The building is less structurally and visually audacious than the initial concept renderings suggest it might have been- the stairway that returns you to the lobby appears to have originally been envisioned as a small scale Guggenheim in concrete-but the building embraces itself without and within. Even the
copper itself mimics the interior path of the permanent exhibit.
The choice of copper to crown the structure is as much philosophical as it is aesthetic. The copper, like the Statue of Liberty, will develop a patina over time, which is meant to symbolize “perseverance in weathering the storm.”
Copper has been chosen as a cladding for buildings for this reason before, the de Young Museum in San Francisco for instance, but this added layer of meaning is seen through as the copper continues into the building itself, and joins you as you finish the journey of the permanent exhibit. The copper within the building will forever retain its brilliance, and will stand in juxtaposition against the rich green it will show on the outside – reminding us of itself and what it has endured.
It’s fitting that OmniPlan’s website asks a question, as we are all left with so many in the face of unspeakable horror. How? Why? The museum succeeds in fulfilling its maxim to “Embrace ideals, challenge reality, participate in repair,” by connecting the cause of the Nuremberg trial, the need to establish human rights to prevent or answer injustice, and even the injustices that would follow the Holocaust throughout the world. These moments in human history are not books on a shelf; they are not separate
and contained. They have happened and are happening in the same place, which of course is the planet we all share. Time and geography are poor distinctions when considering the magnitude of what is inflicted on those who lose their lives, literally and figuratively, to unanswered hate. Distance, in all its forms, cannot separate us from this. Just this week a 93-year old that was a guard at the Stutthoff concentration camp will go on trial for thousands of crimes against humanity.
Yesterday is not so far away as we think, and neither is tomorrow.
dhhrm.org
ARCHITECTURE: Thad Reeves A.GRUPPO Architects
REALESTATE:
Faisal Halum Compass
