Located in downtown Dallas, the substantially modified 1217 Main Street building is a striking transformation of the 1950s-era bank building. The client commissioned the Cuban-born artist Jorge Pardo, a Macarthur Foundation Fellow who has received the Smithsonian’s Luciela Artist Award and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, whose body of work explores the intersection of contemporary painting, design, sculpture, and architecture, to design 36,215 handmade, glazed ceramic tiles to become the primary cladding material for the building that derived its inspiration from the subtle variation of the Texas blue sky.

To express the ceramic art properly, the design team devised a technically complex façade substructure, a one-of-a-kind, for the ceramic tiles to enable the visual concealment of control and expansion joints, panel or module seams, or shadow lines. A particular challenge with placing ceramic tiles on the exterior of a Texas building was the thermal expansion and contraction which could lead to the spalling and delamination of tiles from the façade. In addition to working with the tile fabricator to refine the ceramic bisque and develop a tile with properties closer to porcelain, an aluminum rainscreen system was designed to support each tile and separate their moments from themselves by utilizing structural silicone to adhere each tile onto the aluminum grid.

The ground floor of the building is occupied by a bakery/café/butcher shop/commissary operation with 4-story of creative office floors above. The roof of the previously 4-story building was also converted into an occupiable office floor with exterior balconies affording the outdoor enjoyment of the Dallas downtown scene.

The successful merging of the urban art and architecture transfigured a building that had been a liability for over 20 years into a new downtown anchor that is now full of life day and night. It strongly expressed the client’s intention to permanently transform downtown Dallas into a vibrant pedestrian environment by combining the work of a renowned artist with a major architectural alteration.