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Skylighting Sculpture
by ArchitectureWeek
When Texas entrepreneur Raymond Nasher asked for a "roofless museum" for his extensive sculpture collection, his architects and their consultants delivered a unique interpretation. The Nasher Sculpture Center, which opened in downtown Dallas in 2003, is a synthesis of nature and building: a sculpture garden and a building with a roof that's "open" to the light of the sky.
Because the new museum is intended exclusively for sculpture, the designers were not as limited in their treatment of illumination as they would have been for light-sensitive paintings. While Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano designed a series of five parallel stone-walled pavilions, engineers at Arup crafted a latitude-specific geometry for a cast-aluminum roof that, without any moving parts, admits daylight while shading the interior spaces from direct sun year-round. Landscape architect Peter Walker designed the two-acre (0.8-hectare) sculpture garden as an oasis amidst skyscrapers.
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