Bass proves no downtown is beyond rescue

FORT WORTH -- If the Bauhaus and the modernist architecture that ensued had never happened, "this is what you would get," said Edward P. Bass, gesturing out from the mezzanine over an entrance foyer graced with pilasters, fluted columns and a frescoed dome.

What you get, with early May opening of the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth, is by far the most traditional concert hall built in the United States in more than 65 years. The movement to repeal modernism, having spread from homes to baseball parks, has now penetrated the world of high culture.

Bass Hall aims to be an updated Carnegie Hall, a marble and Texas limestone embodiment of the 18th and 19th century masterpieces to be performed there. It also crowns the revival of a downtown that became a victim of the car culture two decades ago. Count the two 48-foot- tall herald angels on the building's facade as the city's largest civic boosters. While the concert hall refuses to be bound by formulas, the downtown area's recovery, under Bass' primary guidance, closely follows the precepts of two prophets of urban design, Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte. Urban planners hail Fort Worth as proof that no downtown is beyond rescue. "Among people who are looking for new ways to bring life to existing cities," said Fred Koetter, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, "it could stand as a model." Fort Worth's success has inspired open envy especially in Dallas, a city long used to regarding its smaller neighbor (population not even half a million) as laughably mired in stockyard muck. Working in Fort Worth's favor were an ample stock of turn-of-the- century rehab-ready brick buildings and the ability of the Bass family, one of the nation's wealthiest, to buy about 40 blocks. The Bass brothers -- Sid, Edward, Robert, and Lee -- turned a family oil fortune worth tens of millions into a diversified empire worth billions. In Fort Worth, the earlier Bass projects were the sort of modernist designs, including two 38-story office towers of mirrored glass, that could have been anywhere. But the Basses also began renovating old brick buildings and adding harmonious newer ones. They included housing, shopping and night life as well as offices. They remembered the Jacobs and Whyte injunctions to respect human scale and encourage pedestrians. For added downtown security, they financed what has been called the "Basstopo" to patrol on bicycle and horse. The Basses named the district Sundance Square because it once provided hideouts and illicit pleasures for outlaws like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Even on weeknights, the brick sidewalks here are crowded with office workers hanging around for dinner or a movie and tourists hopping between nightclubs and stores. Some Fort Worth residents, however, say their downtown has become a bland, sanitary amusement park, brought to them by the family that, as investors, helped turn around Walt Disney. The local symphony, opera and ballet, as well as the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition finals, have been using a convention center auditorium, since it has taken three of the four Bass brothers more than two decades to develop the alternative. Sid R. Bass' plans for a complex that was dubbed Lincoln Center Southwest fell victim to the collapse of the state's oil and real estate economy in the 1980s. A rival plan by Robert M. Bass, a past chairman of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, for renovating a coliseum used for livestock shows was rejected by voters in 1990. Ed Bass, by then a pioneer resident of downtown, began considering what private money alone, and not only his family's, could do. To design Bass Hall -- named for the Bass brothers' parents, who donated the land -- he chose David M. Schwarz of Washington and Fort Worth, already the prime architect for the Basses' historically minded projects downtown. His best-known design, completed in 1994, has been the Ballpark, the brick and stone Arlington home of the Texas Rangers. Like Camden Yards in Baltimore two years before, Arlington evoked the era before ballparks became concrete fortresses. Ed Bass wanted an architect who could recapture the era before performing arts centers became aloof outdoor sculptures. That era ended in the early 1930s with the completion of Severance Hall in Cleveland, which Schwarz is now expanding, and the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. Bass Hall "is designed to fit into the urban fabric as much as Carnegie," Bass explained. Befitting a practical-minded town that grew up as a cattle-kingdom capital, the hall abounds with refreshment counters, donor plaques, and restrooms. For 2,056 seats, the Bass Hall men's rooms have 38 stalls; the women's, 64. Carnegie Hall, with 2,804 seats, has 40 and 47. Bass boasts of keeping to a $67 million budget. Some economies are evident in the blank side and rear facades and the Erector-set loudspeaker towers at the corners of the stage.

Copyright 1998
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