Borg-like Perot Museum

If you're an aging Texan billionaire there isn't much your children can get you as a present but for Ross Perot, a man worth $3.9 billion, his children have decided to give away $50 million to the Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, Texas.

Perot's children who include Ross Perot Junior, his only son and a billionaire in his own right, have made the donation in honour of their parents with the funding so significant to the scheme that groundwork has been able to start on it and the project is even being called the Perot Museum of Nature & Science showing how lots of money can you buy naming rights for a museum.

The connection is important not only because of the family ties but also because Perot Junior was a former owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team and helped develop Victory Park, the surrounding real estate of the basketball arena that has been undergoing long-term regeneration. Coincidentally, this is the area is where the museum is now being constructed.

The $185 million project has been designed by Morphosis in the form of what is effectively a 14-storey, 52 metre tall cube. Running up one corner of the building and revealed by cutaway cladding will be a glazed atrium whilst elsewhere on the south side will be a 45 metre long escalator glass clad escalator animating it.

This isn't merely structural expressionism at work but rather it can have a double meaning. As the museum will for example have displays on kinetic energy and by situating the escalator in such a prominent position, it does in a sense become a display in its own right.