House of Glass

TADAO ANDO'S FORT WORTH LIGHT SHOW

Tadao Ando, the Japanese architect who makes poetry out of cast concrete, has given the city of Fort Worth what may be the greatest building in the Lone Star State. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which opens this month in the city's cultural district, is Ando's first major public building in the United States. (He is most renowned for his minimalist Church of Light, outside of Osaka, Japan.) Ando is a self-assured stylist with a limited palette: glass, wood, stone, metal, and his signature coolgray concrete. He is also well known for his inspiring use of natural light. The museum's galleries, housed in three soaring glass-enclosed pavilions, are illuminated in large part by a sophisticated system of continuous linear skylights punched into flat concrete-slab roofs. Ando's building is quadruple the size of the old Fort Worth Modern, making it one of the largest gallery spaces devoted to the exhibition of modem art. This will likely produce a "Bilbao effect" for Fort Worth, catapulting it from a city perhaps best known for Billy Bob's Texas, the world's largest honky-tonk, to one of the great art destinations in the world.

MATT TYRNAUER