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showcase architecture
Mel Bochner – Win! (2009)
bucking this otherwise general trend of exclusion and privacy. Now branded the AT&T Stadium (naming rights were allegedly sold for somewhere between US$ 17 and 19 million earlier this year) this was conceived from the very outset as a public building. And hugely successful it has been, receiving a heavy footfall of visitors on a daily basis: school parties, scouts who camp there, tourists and more.
And so it is that, as a public building, its interiors are suggestive of the great public sports buildings of the classical period.
Art house
The story is incredible: architect Bryan Trubey and owner Jerry Jones envisioned the interiors – the entrances, the main atria, concourses, lounges and bars – as grand ‘public’ spaces offering incredible back-drops for major artworks.
With a vision that was as extraordinary as it was generous, they set about selecting a range of the fi nest contemporary artists working today, and commissioned through them a series of original works: mostly wall paintings and wall murals, but also hanging sculptures and ‘installations’. Surely never, since the ancient days of Rome, has there been such a commitment to the artistic adornment of a sports building. And note: these pieces which are collectively priceless are also, in the most part, immovable. Painted, or as ceramics adhered permanently to the walls; they are, just as a classical frieze, an intrinsic part of the very fabric and architecture of the place.
It is this evident pride on the part of the ownership combined with the recognition that, although privately owned, the stadium is effectively a public place which makes the Dallas Cowboys’ gesture so intriguing. After all, why else do it? Why commission such work? Why commit such a large investment of sponsorship and effort into artworks that in most cases cannot even be moved, and whose monetary value can therefore never be realised?
But this is just the point: Jerry Jones realised that, like sport, art ‘lifts the spirit’. As with architecture he recognised the power of art to do just that and more. And like the ancients, he realised that the stadium, as perhaps the pre-eminent public building, offers the most incredible back-drop for art. It is a place of ‘civitas’. As a great patron, Jerry Jones has re-aligned art with architecture.
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