Dallas Arts District
— nineteen blocks where the city went quiet for the arts.
Not only on a wall.
Dallas Arts District, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“Nineteen city blocks set aside, by a 1977 plan, for music halls and museums and a high school for the arts. Four Pritzker-winning architects ended up working within sight of each other: I. M. Pei, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaas. The Cathedral Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe sits inside the same footprint, older than any of them. Most afternoons the plazas are empty. Evenings the lights come up across the whole twenty-acre stretch at once, and the freeway behind it goes quiet. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
The Dallas Arts District covers roughly twenty contiguous acres across nineteen city blocks in downtown Dallas, bounded by Woodall Rodgers Freeway, Ross Avenue, St. Paul, and Routh Streets. It is the largest contiguous urban arts district in the United States. The footprint was set by a 1977 Sasaki Associates master plan; the first anchor, the Dallas Museum of Art, opened on the site in 1984. Four Pritzker laureates have buildings within the district: I. M. Pei (Meyerson Symphony Center, 1989), Renzo Piano (Nasher Sculpture Center, 2003), Norman Foster (Winspear Opera House, 2009), and Rem Koolhaas with Joshua Prince-Ramus (Wyly Theatre, 2009).
The buildings are a deliberate conversation in material. Pei's Meyerson is travertine and limestone, curved walls turning the corner at Pearl and Flora. Piano's Nasher uses the same travertine, quarried near Tivoli outside Rome, with a cast-aluminum sunscreen overhead. Foster's Winspear sets a red glass canopy over a Solid drum; Koolhaas's Wyly stands across the lawn as a twelve-story aluminum cube. Inside that mix, the Cathedral Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe — completed in 1902 in red brick and granite, decades before any of it — holds the district's oldest material.
Most institutions cluster within a six-minute walk of each other. The Dallas Museum of Art has offered free general admission since 2013, with paid special exhibitions; the Nasher Sculpture Center charges a single ticket that includes its garden. The Meyerson Symphony Center hosts the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in season, and the Winspear and Wyly carry the opera, theatre, and Dallas Black Dance Theatre calendars. The DART Pearl/Arts District station drops at the western edge. Klyde Warren Park, a 5.2-acre deck park, lids the Woodall Rodgers Freeway and bridges the district to Uptown.
