*********Story from Merlin Archive********

Headline: THE CRESCENT

Dallas' Newest, Glitziest High-Rise Promises Us
A Great Building, But Does It Deliver The Goods?
Byline: David Dillon
Publication Date: 03/30/1986 12:00:00 AM
Publication Info: Page: 1C; Section ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT; Zone: ; Edition:
HOME FINAL
Publication: The Dallas Morning News

The Crescent is contemporary architecture on an imperial scale,

corporate America and Napoleon Bonaparte together on one site. In a

single stroke, Dallas got three French Classical office towers, a

226-room hotel and a retail pavilion with 50 shops and galleries, all

sitting atop a 4,100-car parking garage that is a kind of vehicular

Grand Canyon.

Whatever else one can say, the Crescent is not cheap or

fainthearted. It has the largest cut slate roof in the world; only the

Empire State Building has more Indiana limestone. Along with LTV Center

and the Allied Bank Tower, it epitomizes Dallas' new fascination with

its skyline and with architecture as a municipal symbol.

The Crescent's greatest strength is its clear, rigorous plan,

compared to which the conventional mixed-use development resembles the

House that Jack Built. But between the big idea and the particular

details lies enough hedging and backstepping to rob the Crescent of its

clarity and conviction. It seems the product of several architectural

visions, which often as not conflict rather than complement one

another.

The grand vision is the clearest. Architects Philip Johnson and

John Burgee, in association with Shepherd & Boyd, have placed the tallest

buildings, the 18- and 19-story office towers, along the Pearl Street or

downtown side of the project. The project then steps back and down to a

three-story retail pavilion at the intersection of Maple and Cedar

Springs. This arrangement gives the Crescent a dramatic skyline and

freeway profile while respecting the low-rise residential character of

adjacent Oak Lawn.

The project's three major components -- retail, hotel and office --

are connected by a pedestrian spine that runs north to south, starting

at the arched entrance to the Stanley Korshak specialty store and

terminating in the soaring lobby of the central office tower. What is

now the Korshak entrance originally was to be part of a public

passageway with shops on either side ("You don't rent the front door,'

Johnson said after learning of the change).

But even the commercialized version makes an attractive prelude to

a walkway featuring an open-air rotunda with an elaborate, three-tier

fountain, an intimate courtyard with gardens and reflecting pools, and

a grand interior street known as Crescent Court Boulevard that is only

slightly narrower than New York's Park Avenue. The arrangement is both
formal and flexible, keeping office workers out of the path of shoppers

and allowing hotel guests to remain blissfully unaware of both.

Because the site lies midway between downtown and Park Cities, part

urban and part suburban, the architects attempted to keep a foot in

both worlds. The office towers and the grand interior street speak the

language of the city, though in a somewhat self-absorbed and

introverted manner. Everything else speaks the patois of loopland and

strip shopping centers, where the automobile rules.

Along Cedar Springs and Maple -- potentially lively pedestrian

promenades -- the Crescent shops are separated from the sidewalk by

several rows of parking. There is no edge, no sharp delineation of

street and building. Along Pearl Street, the main link to downtown, the

project moons the public with ramps, parking lots, loading docks and

what is probably the world's first French Classical drive-in bank. A

grove of trees at the intersection of Pearl and McKinney is inadequate

to screen this clutter from view. In working so hard to create a

private interior world at the Crescent, the architects have haphazardly

treated the edges where the project meets the rest of the city.

Inside is Johnson/Burgee's best design stroke: Crescent Court

Boulevard, a combination ceremonial boulevard and public square that

gives the project a symbolic center while connecting it to the outside

world. It is sufficiently grand -- 140 feet across -- to mediate the

dramatic differences in scale between the office buildings and the

five-story hotel. Unfortunately, the office towers are so massive and

monolithic that little sun penetrates Crescent Court during the winter

months.

Worse, Crescent Court has been turned into a parking lot, in which

the fountain and trees -- the urban grace notes -- are overwhelmed by

limos and sports cars. Johnson/Burgee's master plan allows for some

parking, but using every square foot for vehicles is obviously not what

they had in mind. With 4,100 spaces underground, and an army of

solicitous car parkers, why would anyone do this?

On the north side of the street, between the office towers and the

retail pavilion, stands the Crescent Court Hotel, the most

architecturally accomplished of the three sections. Here the project's

Pharaonic budget -- estimated at $300 million -- has been used to good

effect. The lobby, designed by Kalef Alaton of Los Angeles and Shepherd

& Partners, has tall windows and ceilings and massive columns, yet

exudes the kind of old-fashioned grandeur that makes guests feel more

important than the space.

The Beau Nash restaurant and bar, also designed by Alaton, is an

equally impressive mixture of tall, painted ceilings, massive mahogany

columns, with a bar the size of a yacht in the center. These interiors
are among the most knowing and sophisticated in Dallas, the equal of

the Manhattan and European versions to which they clearly allude.

Elsewhere, however, confusion reigns. If God is in the details, as

Mies van der Rohe reportedly once said, then the office towers are at

best agnostic. They are certainly as eclectic as anything

Johnson/Burgee has designed of late, mixing contemporary and period

details in sometimes baffling ways. The mansard roofs, with their

finials and frilly ridges, make pleasant if somewhat kitschy skyline

decorations. At least they are designed to be seen against the sky, as

Francois Mansard intended, instead of being pushed down over the brow

of the building like oversized hats.

But the metal-and-glass bay windows in the center of each tower

look like cheap afterthoughts, especially in combination with the

elegant Indiana limestone. And the base of the building is a complete

flop, too slight and unarticulated for such a massive facade. It's as

though the weight of the towers has pressed it into the earth, leaving

only a narrow band of polished granite showing. On a building that

works so hard to evoke older architecture -- in which the clear

division of a building into base, shaft and top was axiomatic -- this

is not a minor slip.

Spreading over, above and around the Crescent, like a kind of

architectural psoriasis, is the cast aluminum grillwork. Whatever value

it has as a decorative or scaling device is offset by its riotous

proliferation. No surface or shape has been spared, with the retail

pavilion getting the most heavy-handed treatment. Some shop fronts are

virtually obscured by swirls of vines and clusters of grapes.

The architects and the developer, Rosewood Corporation, explain

these details as a grander expression of early Texas architecture, and

point to precedents along the Texas Gulf Coast, such as Nicholas

Clayton's Ashton Villa in Galveston. But most of these older structures

are less than four stories tall, and their ironwork was manufactured on

the East Coast and shipped in. It is about as indigenous as the mansard

roof on the neighborhood McDonald's.

For the past decade Johnson/Burgee has led the march away from the

cool, unembellished architecture of the modern movement toward romantic

buildings that evoke memories and tell stories. AT&T in New York,

Transco Tower and RepublicBank Center in Houston, and PPG in Pittsburgh

-- to cite only the most familiar examples -- are all plays on historic

forms, adapted to the needs of today's corporate clients.

The Crescent is another link in that chain, a grand period piece

with monumental spaces, rich materials and a romantic flair. To protest

that a pseudo-French Classical building with cast aluminum chachkahs

is inappropriate for Dallas is to miss the point. On this front, the

Crescent is almost quintessentially American, no quirkier than the old

neoclassical Dallas City Hall or Highland Park Village. Style is a

minor issue.

Compared to the Infomart, Dallas' latest architectural stage set,

it is a model of resolve. Its historical intentions don't stop with the

application of a few decorative panels to a conventional glass box.

They are expressed in the plan and, to some extent, in the detailing.

But the Crescent fails in its attempt to reconcile the competing

claims of city and suburb. Its grand plan is compromised by Dallas'

obsession with the automobile and the strip shopping center.

Intermittently brilliant and always entertaining, the Crescent

ultimately cannot deliver on what it has promised.

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