This week Ishita Sharma, the artist-architect behind Studio ISH, captured these shots of the rising Thom Mayne-designed Perote Museum of Nature & Science in Dallas, Texas. The $185 million dollar building is scheduled for completion by 2013, though judging from these photos, it could be sooner.

The Museum is part of a sweeping urban plan that Dallas, a city that suffered (comparatively) little through the recession, has enacted over the last few years. The goal? Harnessing the oil-fueled economic momentum of the city to cover one of its biggest highways with green space, cultural programs, and pedestrian paths.

Click through for the images.

The Museum sits just adjacent to the Woodall Rogers Freeway. If you’re unfamiliar with Dallas, the city is in the process of covering the sunken six-lane highway with parks and cultural centers, including the highway-adjacent Perote Museum. Thom Mayne, who is a figurehead for car-centric LA, is not known for the urban sensitivity of his work, and was thus an unlikely choice for the commission. But the building is formally promising, and as a Dallas resident (or, child of Dallas residents), I’m excited to go see it. Ishita comments that the folded-concrete facade “reminds me of the quarries Edward Burtynsky often shoots, except the delineation of chiseled form is so much more controlled.”

Also, amazing how similar these images are to the in-progress shots of REX’s Dallas Wyly Theater (completed in 2009), no? The two buildings, at least in their siting and partially-sunken plinths, aren’t completely dissimilar, either.

An original rendering.

All photos (c) Studio ISH.

All photos (c) Ishita Sharma.

by Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan

posted in Uncategorized

tagged construction shots, dallas, morphosis, perote museum, texas, thom mayne

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