A touch of magic at Nasher museum

DALLAS -- ''A critic is a person who tells you about his adventures among masterpieces," wrote the French author Anatole France. Alas, masterpieces don't happen so often. But now and then one does come along. The new Nasher Sculpture Center, which opened here recently, is a masterpiece. Anyone interested in either art or architecture should find a way of visiting this astonishing place.

The Nasher was built to hold a collection of modern sculpture amassed by Ray Nasher, a Dallas shopping-center developer. Nasher funded the museum's $70 million cost entirely by himself. The architect is Renzo Piano, the Italian winner of the prestigious Pritzker prize.

Piano has done other fine museums, notably the Menil Collection in Houston and the superb Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland. But the Nasher is in a class by itself. Sometimes, when a great artist reaches his later years (Piano is 68), the work grows quieter, surer, less fussy. The Nasher is an example. This is a building that distills the uncluttered essence of light and space.

It really couldn't be simpler. The whole museum consists of five parallel, nearly identical long halls. The walls of the halls are pale Italian travertine. The floors are blond oak. Each hall is roofed by a vault of perforated aluminum. The five halls are pure space, because the museum's ample offices and support functions are tucked into a basement level. You enter the halls at one end, coming off the street, and you emerge at the other end, through a glass wall, into a green garden. Some of the works of sculpture are indoors and some are out. Every modern sculptor you ever heard of seems to be here -- Rodin, Picasso, Matisse, Calder, Giacometti, Moore, Miro, Serra, di Suvero, and many others.

Part of the Nasher's magic is the siting. As you enter, your back is to the high-rise office towers of downtown Dallas. You leave them behind as you pass through the quiet halls and out into the enclosed garden. It's the kind of procession you feel in a fairy tale or children's story, where the hero passes from the real world through some kind of magic portal -- the looking glass in Lewis Carroll's tale, the closet in the tales of Narnia, or the invisible train track in ''Harry Potter" -- into a mythical realm.

At the far end of the garden is an even more secret place, an architectural cave illuminated in changing colors by the light artist James Turrell.

Another magical element is the light. Piano is famous for creating elaborate museum roofs that filter the sun's rays, as at the Beyeler and the Menil. But this time, the client, Nasher, told his architect he wanted something simpler. The result is a true invention, a roof unlike any done before. Working with his structural engineers at the Arup firm, Piano came up with the Nasher's perforated vaults of cast aluminum. The vaults have no moving parts. Instead, they're so perfectly calibrated to the angles of the sun that no direct rays enter the interior on any day of the year. Instead you get a warm glow of ambient light that stands comparison with the world-famous light of Louis Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum in nearby Fort Worth.

As with many great buildings, there's a hidden metaphor at the Nasher. You can read it not as the new building it actually is, but rather as a restored ruin. You can imagine that those long travertine walls, which look so traditional, are the remains of a building on this site, a building that lost its roof and remained as a ruin of free-standing walls. And you can imagine that the architect then came along and created a new building by enclosing the old stone walls in shiny modern metal and glass.

Piano has tucked a knowing fiction into his design. You're barely aware of it, but it gives this remarkable building a sense of having lived in time, of not having sprung up overnight.

As usual with a great building, other strong figures besides the architect were involved. The client, Nasher, turned down Piano's first two designs, which he thought didn't fit the site. Arup engineers were critical to the design of the roof. And the museum's wonderful garden is a collaboration between Piano and landscape architect Peter Walker, a former chair of the department of landscape architecture at Harvard, who is also a member of the team designing the Sept. 11 memorial in Manhattan. Two firms of local Texas architects collaborated on construction details and supervision.

Piano became known in 1971 when he and British architect Richard Rogers won a competition to design the Pompidou Center in Paris, a bold, garish building that looks like a vividly painted industrial complex. In the long curve of a career, Piano has emerged in Dallas with a building that possesses a confidence, serenity, and simplicity that are the opposite of the nervous, theatrical energy of the Pompidou.

The Nasher belongs on anyone's list of the best recent American buildings. It makes you look forward with interest to Piano's next. He's at work on three major projects in the United States: an office tower for the New York Times, an addition to the High Museum in Atlanta, and an addition and renovation at the Morgan Library in New York. If he can maintain the Nasher's standard, they should be something to behold.

Robert Campbell can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.