Field Operations, the landscape architecture firm best known for its work on New York’s High Line, is joining the design team reimagining the Dallas Museum of Art.
That ambitious project, initially budgeted at $150 million to $175 million and led by the Spanish architecture firm Nieto Sobejano, is currently in its design phase, and is intended to better integrate the museum with its Arts District environment.
“Field Operations is a highly recognized firm with international reach, supported by extensive experience working within local contexts,” the museum wrote in a statement. “The DMA and Field Operations have a clear philosophical alignment with the overall design intent for the future of the Museum.”
The firm is not new to Dallas. Among its projects is West End Square, the small but technically sophisticated neighborhood park developed by Parks for Downtown Dallas (now the Downtown Parks Conservancy), the nonprofit founded by Robert Decherd, the former longtime leader of DallasNews Corporation.
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Aerial view of West End Square, designed by Field Operations. (Juan Figueroa/ The Dallas Morning News)(Juan Figueroa)
“Field Operations is thrilled to join the DMA design team. Our goal is to forge stronger connections with the Arts District and Klyde Warren Park, while developing dynamic public spaces that build community through art, culture, nature and civic engagement,” said the firm’s founding partner, James Corner.
The firm replaces Dallas-based SWA Group, which had been the landscape architect on the design team that won the 2023 competition to reimagine the museum. With the retirement of Chuck McDaniel, who had led the project for SWA, the museum chose to move in another direction.
Field Operations was selected from a field of four finalists, the others being the Texas-based firms Ten Eyck Landscape Architects (designers of Harwood Park in downtown Dallas) and Hocker (responsible for the museum’s Eagle Plaza) and the Cambridge-based firm Reed Hilderbrand (which renovated the museum’s Fleischner courtyard, facing Harwood Street).
The firm is well-suited to a project that seeks to renegotiate the boundaries between the museum building and the city around it. Corner, a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design and winner of the Cooper-Hewitt’s National Design Award, was instrumental in developing the field of “landscape urbanism,” which seeks to elevate the role of landscape architecture in the design of urban space.
That approach is well illustrated by the High Line, the converted elevated railroad that fuses architecture, art and landscape into a dramatic civic amenity (and tourist attraction) on Manhattan’s west side. Other projects include Freshkills Park, a reclamation of a 2,200-acre landfill on New York’s Staten Island, and the remaking of Chicago’s Navy Pier.
The firm will have its work cut out for it at the DMA. Among the challenges it faces will be creating an inviting space between the museum and Klyde Warren Park; rethinking the underused and environmentally intensive lawn that currently fronts Ross Avenue; and negotiating the relationship between the museum and its sculpture garden, a masterwork by legendary landscape architect Dan Kiley that has fallen into sad disrepair.
Those physical challenges will be compounded by administrative ones. The museum is currently without a permanent director, after the departure of Agustín Arteaga last year. That leaves a vacuum in both the museum’s leadership and fundraising abilities as the project moves from planning to implementation.
The museum has yet to announce a timeline for either the naming of a new director or the presentation of a revised design and budget for its expansion.
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