Editor’s note: Art and the City is a special project by The Dallas Morning News arts and entertainment staff. We asked more than 100 members of North Texas’ creative community to tell us in their own words how they are living life and making art during the great shutdown of 2020. We also asked artists to share a piece of work that is especially meaningful to them right now. You can contribute to this project by emailing us at artslife@dallasnews.com or sharing your work online with the hashtag #DFWArtMatters. We are sharing work weekly in our free Arts & Entertainment newsletter; sign up at join.dallasnews.com/newsletter.
Want to see more from Art and the City 2020? Check out the links below:
- Photography
- Film
- Creative writing
- Classical music
- Architecture
- Pop music
- Theater
- Dance
- Gallery art
- Curated art
- Indie art
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Among his peers, Max Levy is thought of as something like the poet laureate of Dallas architecture.
While the practice of architecture can become subsumed by practicalities and technicalities, Levy’s work is an imaginative exploration of the phenomenological qualities of building: the way light and nature and materiality interact in space.
It seemed natural to turn to him to find meaning in architecture in this difficult moment.
— Mark Lamster, Dallas Morning News architecture critic
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My office has dispersed to our respective houses, and I now find myself drawing next to an open window. I can hear the birds outside, and the rain, and I can lie down on a bed to think. These drawings seem better somehow.
I’m designing a small house on a modest budget for a young cattle rancher whose ecological principles have beautifully vitalized her land. The house is long and skinny, so that it fits between the trees. None will be cut down.
A quintet of boxlike skylights dot the length of the roof. Each skylight acknowledges a different facet of nature. One glows yellow at sunrise and red at sunset. One channels a little rainfall into a flower vase on the dining table. Another, equipped with a wind vane, transfers the motion of breezes to the room below.
I suspect many of us have fantasized of a refuge in nature away from the viral threat.
There is a soothing quality inherent in much of nature that beckons to us now.
It has always been there, of course, but we seldom notice because of our hurry.
Architecture, handled in a certain way, can bring this soothing quality into our lives. Most of us could probably use a bit of this relief every day — and not just in a time of pandemic.
— Max Levy
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