-By David Dillon

Gary Cunningham is a burly guy, a linebacker, lumberjack type, who works in a sprawling warehouse near downtown Dallas, surrounded by welders, engineers, landscape architects, graphic designers, and computer geeks. A loose, at times bewildering arrangement, as much repertory company as architecture office, it nevertheless reflects the open-ended, exploratory spirit of Cunningham's work.

"We don't design beautiful buildings," he says emphatically. The Golden Section and the flawless joint are not for him. Nor is he interested in developing a signature look or style. "I like to start over every time. I couldn't handle consistency."



Yet even a cursory survey of Cunningham's architecture shows that his contrarian, "take that" attitude is neither an affectation nor a marketing ploy, but a starting point and first principle. His range is impressive, from houses, schools, and office buildings to churches, theaters, and a tribal center for Southern Ute Indians. No two projects are alike, yet all express a set of basic convictions about materials, structure, and process that connect him to builder-architects of previous generations, as well as to the earlier Arts and Crafts movement.

"Corky's not an ivory tower type," says one client of Cunningham. "If push comes to shove, he knows he can always do it himself."

Among Cunningham's first solo projects in the 1980s was a pair of modest suburban office buildings in North Dallas—"dumb boxes," to quote him—that provided an antidote to all the loud, strident commercial architecture going up nearby. Instead of grandstanding shapes and gimmicky special effects, Cunningham designed simple, carefully crafted brick shells that do their job with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of common sense. Decoration is limited to discreet brick banding on the façade and a bit of teak trim around doors and windows. A torqued staircase is about it for pyrotechnics.

Cunningham took quietness to another level with his Cistercian Abbey Church in Irving, Texas (1992). Unlike many recent churches, more interested in flexibility than sacredness, it evokes 900 years of history, scholarship, and prayer while remaining unmistakably modern in its construction and handling of natural light. Set against a low hill, its copper roof hidden behind massive limestone parapets, the Abbey Church conveys a powerful impression of weight and strength, reaching back across time to evoke a culture and a way of life, and memorialize them in stone.

Yet simplicity and directness is only one of Cunningham's modes. His breakout project was the 1988 Power House, a 1920s electrical substation in Dallas that he converted into a stunning residence using steel, chrome, glass, and much of the original machinery, including a 20-ton traveling crane and a huge chain fall. Remarkably, the house was designed and built on the fly, without complete working drawings or lengthy discussions with the client.

"We realized that we didn't have to spend six months in the office doing all that," Cunningham recalls. "We could begin the collaborative process at once because architects, contractors, and craftsmen were all in the same boat. The job changed the way we practiced." He reprised the idea, though not the specific design, in his 2004 conversion of an abandoned Dallas pump station, incorporating existing pumps, pipes, and holding tanks into a stunning meeting space and gallery for local arts organizations.

The Addison Conference and Theatre Center (1992) shows Cunningham's skill at playing the hand that's been dealt. Taking the mundane fragments of the existing site — a windmill, a stone cottage, and water tower — he created a major civic space in the middle of a faceless, drive-by suburb. The centerpiece is the theater, a combination factory and renaissance playhouse with 200 seats, classical proportions, and rugged industrial materials, including concrete floors, concrete block walls, and a dizzying assortment of joists and I-beams for creating unusual performance spaces. The basement can be flooded, the floor can accommodate eight feet of soil, and a fire truck can be suspended from the ceiling. Cunningham describes it as "just a lot of rock 'n' roll technology, more U2 than classical theater," but actors and directors describe it as one of the most exciting performance spaces in the country.

Cunningham's destruction and recreation of his own 1930s tract house could stand as the exclamation point to his career so far. The project took 10 years (1992 to 2002) and involved his entire family, who tore out walls, poured foundations, and helped build a three-story bedroom tower where the front lawn used to be. He pushed the zoning code to the limit, which sent some of his neighbors into shock. When the house eventually won an award, one juror suggested that the neighbors get one as well for putting up with him.

Cunningham clearly enjoyed every minute of the confrontation, and saw the fallout as just part of the design process. "If you believe in something strongly you have to fight for it, and sometimes that scares the hell out of people."

David Dillon has been the architecture critic for the Dallas Morning News since 1983. He has an M.A. and Ph.D from Harvard University in literature and art history, and was a Loeb Fellow at its Graduate School of Design in 1986–87. He has written 10 books, including Dallas Architecture 1936–1986, The Architecture of O'Neil Ford, The Miller Garden: Icon of Modernism, and Kallmann, McKinnell & Wood. He is also the author of the new plan for Washington, D.C., Extending the Legacy, as well as the plan for the White House and President's Park. He is a contributing editor to Architectural Record and writes regularly for numerous national design and planning magazines, including Landscape Architecture, Preservation and Planning.