Entertainment

03:40 PM CST on Tuesday, December 27, 2005

By DAVID DILLON / The Dallas Morning News

Not only will Dallas be the first American city with a vehicular bridge by Santiago Calatrava, it is apparently the first city anywhere with "three" Calatrava bridges. Or so boasted Mayor Laura Miller at the groundbreaking celebration for "porto numero uno" earlier this month.

Civic pride is a legitimate concern, but it would be healthy if Dallas were also as interested in making great places as spectacular objects.

The Dallas Arts District will soon have an opera house by Foster and Partners and a theater by Rem Koolhaas to go along with a concert hall by I.M. Pei and museums by Renzo Piano and Edward Larrabee Barnes. Three of the four are Pritzker Prize winners, all are exceptionally talented in different ways. But what the Arts District – and the rest of Dallas – lacks are great streets and great public spaces. Those are still afterthoughts, if they are thoughts at all. Cities with dozens of parking lots but few parks are in for trouble. .

New Orleans after Katrina

New Orleans after Katrina was our Pompeii, London Fire, San Francisco Earthquake and tsunami all rolled into one, the ultimate disaster diagram in which all systems failed and no conventional response, or combination of responses, was sufficient to avert catastrophe.

Overnight, the most romantic city in America became a mountain of moldering rubble, as though it had been carpet bombed. The home of Louis Armstrong and Tennessee Williams, of beignets and crawfish etouffée, saw its history flattened and its residents scattered to 44 states and several other countries, many never to return.

New Orleans must now reinvent itself, not in some mushy, pop poetic, Dr Phil kind of way, but from the ground up, block-by-block, neighborhood-by-neighborhood. Its infrastructure is ruined, its schools are closed, roughly one third of its houses are destroyed or uninhabitable. Mayor Ray Nagin has warned that New Orleans will be broke by March, while the federal government has distributed only a fraction of the aid it initially promised.

The new New Orleans will certainly have fewer people – 250,000 instead of 475,000 – and will likely occupy far less ground as well. The French Quarter and the Garden District, the places where tourists go, are slowly bouncing back, but other parts of the city, including the black Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East, may have to be written off.

This will likely produce an epic political battle in a city where almost nobody trusts city hall. How New Orleans deals with this political crisis, as well as with its educational, economic and environmental crises, will tell us a lot about how America is going to deal with its beleaguered cities in the future.

E-mail ddillon@dallasnews.com

Rebuilding New Orleans

This is the story of the decade rather than the year, involving nothing less than the reconstruction of one of the world's most romantic cities. The rebuilt city will likely be only half its former size, but whether it will still be New Orleans, or Anywhere USA with a bit of gumbo seasoning, won't be known for years.

The Gates

The saffron-drenched extravaganza by artists Christo and Jeanne Claude gave several million visitors a chance to experience Central Park in a new light and a new shade. Even die-hard New Yorkers, for whom no hues are good hues, succumbed to the spectacle of 7,500 billowing portals crisscrossing Frederick Law Olmsted's masterpiece.

The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University

It brings the treasures of the Nasher Sculpture Center to an academically rich but artistically impoverished region in North Carolina. Architect Rafael Viñoly's precast concrete polygon doesn't sing like Renzo Piano's travertine and glass pavilions in Dallas, but it should work well for both students and the public.

De Young Museum

After years of lawsuits and raucous public debate, former Dallas Museum of Art director Harry Parker's de Young Museum opened in San Francisco in October. Designed by Herzog & De Meuron of Basel, Switzerland, the museum is a dramatic copper box punctuated by gardens and courtyards, with a 145-foot tower overlooking San Francisco Bay. The new building replaces one badly damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

Philip Johnson dies

Philip Johnson, whose Dallas projects include the Crescent, Thanks-Giving Square and the Kennedy Memorial, died Jan. 27 at 98. His architecture was wildly uneven, but his support of younger designers and proselytizing for architecture as art was unsurpassed.

Santiago Calatrava

He won the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in May, then broke ground for the first of three Trinity River bridges in December. That may be two too many, but the first span, an extension of Woodall Rodgers Expressway into West Dallas, is both dramatic and poetic.

Uptown development

Dallas caught high-rise-condo fever with several dozen towers open, under construction or planned. Most start around $500 a square foot and are aimed squarely at folks who want hot tortilla soup at 3 a.m. and can pay for it.

Urban Market

The architecture isn't much – you could even say there is no architecture – but the importance of this modest grocery cum restaurant and wine bar to downtown renewal shouldn't be underestimated. When beleaguered urbanites can finally walk down the street for quesadillas and a bottle of decent red at night, there's hope.

Arts Magnet comes together

The final design for the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, the populist centerpiece of the Arts District, was unveiled in October. Brad Cloepfil's building manages to be both pragmatic and progressive, giving students more space and new opportunities without sacrificing the ad hoc, improvisational spirit of the original.

Mark Lemmon exhibit

In a city virtually bereft of architectural exhibitions, "Crafting Traditions: The Architecture of Mark Lemmon" stood out for its imaginative installation and thoughtful treatment of the work of one of Dallas' most accomplished, and unfairly overlooked, designers. Shortly after the show opened, Meadows Museum director Ted Pillsbury resigned, leaving the prospects for future exhibitions murky.