Updated at 7:15 p.m. Jan. 5, 2018 with DMN architecture critic Mark Lamster's interview on KERA's Art & Seek podcast.

Of all the buildings in Dallas, none has been so consistently misunderstood, mistreated, misused, mismanaged, maligned and generally neglected as Frank Lloyd Wright's Kalita Humphreys Theater.

It is a sorry treatment that began before this landmark structure was even completed, in 1959, and has pretty much continued unabated ever since. Even this paper has been guilty of defamation. After one of the many unfortunate renovations inflicted upon the theater over the years, my predecessor as architecture critic bemoaned it as a "forlorn ammonite in a sea of asphalt."

Let me suggest a more generous reading.

The Kalita, which became a city landmark in 2005, is an iconic late work by America's most singular architect; a masterpiece of structural daring wedged with care into a verdant landscape; and an enveloping jewel that promotes innovative theatrical productions. At least this is how it was conceived, and in many ways how it remains, although its attributes have been veiled and sometimes erased by decades of accumulated degradation, in both the physical and figurative senses.

This is an unacceptable waste of a civic treasure, though not one that is irredeemable. After years of stalling, a recently formed nonprofit group, the Kalita Humphreys Theater at Turtle Creek Conservancy, is working to move forward on a 2010 master plan the city commissioned for the theater's rehabilitation, but never formally adopted. The conservancy aims to implement that plan on behalf of the city, to raise funds for the project, and to oversee the maintenance and administration of the theater going forward.

"This needs to happen now," says Ann Abernathy, a preservation architect who specializes in Wright's work and has led the campaign to restore the theater. "The building has become degraded over the years and is not recognizable as a work of architectural significance. It has many areas that are unsafe and can't be used. It's impossible to use the theater spaces as Wright originally intended them to be used."

Things have become so bad that the theater's fire curtain was removed and not replaced.

A new kind of theater

There was a time when things were very different, when the theater represented the very height of the city's conjoined artistic and architectural aspirations. That year was 1954, and although the city had several theater companies, it had no repertory theater with its own dedicated building. The leading champion for such an entity was this paper's influential arts writer, John Rosenfield, and with his energy and contacts a founding committee for the Dallas Theater Center was born.

For an artistic director the group looked south to Waco, which may have seemed an unlikely place to find an inspirational leader of avant-garde theater in the United States. But there they found Paul R. Baker, a baby-faced picture of innocence who was anything but. Born in rural Texas in 1911, Baker grew up in Waxahachie, studied drama at Yale, and directed entertainment for the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II, service for which he received the French Legion of Merit.

At Baylor, where he had been on faculty since the 1930s, Baker pioneered an immersive new kind of theater for the modern era, one that abandoned the conventions of the Victorian past. "Lingering nineteenth-century creeds are responsible for a present-day theater that is weak-kneed, gutless, and loaded with sentimental and elaborate manners," he said. To facilitate his vision, he designed his own auditorium, Studio One, that put the audience in swivel chairs so they could follow action on five separate stages.

Attention followed. After seeing Baker's 1953 production of Othello, Charles Laughton called him "a fantastic genius" and "a man absolutely without fear" on national radio. Baker, he said, "could change the whole course of the theater."

Frank Lloyd Wright made similar claims as to his own artistic courage, and for half a century, he too had been nursing ideas about reinventing the theater. His first attempts came in the 1910s. His 1931 proposal for a theater for Woodstock, N.Y., dispensed with the proscenium stage and put the audience in a more intimate relationship with actors. That project dissolved, but Wright brought the design back and further developed it in 1949 for clients in Hartford, Conn., who also declined to build it.

Robert Stecker (left), president Dallas Theater Center Board, with Kalita Humphreys Theater architect Frank Lloyd Wright (center) and Paul Baker, director of the Dallas Theater Center, upon Wright's arrival at Love Field. Undated.

"This theater is the one thing I simply must build before they put me in a box," he said at the time, a phrase that was more prophetic than he could have realized.

Dallas would at least give him the chance. Wright had been the Theater Center building committee's top choice from the outset. Rosenfield, in particular, admired him, and had visited Taliesin, Wright's Wisconsin home and studio, in 1946. At that time, Wright was at work on the Rogers Lacy Hotel, a glassy tower for downtown Dallas that also went unbuilt for lack of funds.

The lead article on the June 22, 1947, front page of The Dallas Morning News was about the planned Rogers Legacy Hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

The committee wanted Wright, but they had reservations about hiring an 86-year-old prima donna who was known to treat budgets as if they were mere suggestions. For assurance, they contacted the oil magnate Harold C. Price, who had commissioned a Wright home and a tower for his company in Bartlesville, Okla. "If you want the best possible design that you can get, then get Mr. Wright," he wrote. "If you want just an ordinary theater design, get someone else — anyone will do."

Wright, always in need of work to support his grand lifestyle and Taliesin workshop, was happy to once again have a theater commission. "I wanted to be an actor when I was young," he told the committee. "If you people have the money, you can rest assured that I'll build it."

The troubles begin

Wright arrived in Dallas to inspect the Turtle Creek site in August 1955. In defiance of the climate and common sense, he wore a wool suit and a great coat. It was a sartorial message. Frank Lloyd Wright was not inclined to sacrifice his grand aesthetic vision in the interest of personal comfort. As a matter of principle, he believed in natural ventilation and opposed the use of air conditioning.

This would become a problem at the DTC. Wright didn't adequately plan for cooling, and during construction rehearsal and storage space had to be requisitioned for that purpose.

Wright was pleased by the lush Turtle Creek landscape. Sloping and verdant with a chalky rock brow, it was ideally suited to his philosophy of design within nature. Wright insisted his buildings should be nestled into the landscape and not plopped down heroically on top of it.

He was less well inclined to the local man-made environment. Downtown Dallas, he complained, had "about as much life as a rubber doormat." His theater, he promised, would be a "thoroughbred." The other buildings of Dallas? Nags.

The Dallas Theater Center Kalita Humphreys Theater is nestled among trees alongside Turtle Creek, Dec. 15, 2017. (Guy Reynolds)

Baker found a similarly congenial if condescending Wright a month later, when he and Rosenfield arrived at Taliesin to make plans for the project. After being shown to their accommodations, they were received by the master, who appeared carrying a large wooden display case holding his various awards and medals. A formal dinner followed, with the host enthroned at the head of the table. It was pure theater, and it worked as intended on the visitors, despite their expertise in that field. "I was reduced to utter humility," Baker wrote of the experience.

The next day they got down to business and agreed to work from the basic design Wright had developed for Hartford. He would finally get to build his theater.

That decision has led to a belief that the theater was a fait accompli passed off on Dallas. That is false. "This is a building that in Mr. Wright's mind grew out of the site," says Kelly Oliver, the Wright apprentice who managed the theater's construction. "Sure it's a plan that he used at Hartford, but I wish people would forget that. The building really fits in that site so nicely and it's so appropriate to its location."

Dismissing the theater as some kind of interloper is not only erroneous but also self-abnegating.

"The ideas were percolating for decades and it was finally realized here, because far-thinking Dallasites allowed him to build it," says Abernathy.

Preservation architect Ann Abernathy has led the fight to restore the Kalita Humphreys Theater. (Paul Fahrenbruch / Ann Abernathy)

Allowing him to do it — and paying for it — were separate affairs. In pursuit of the latter goal, Wright flew in to Dallas for a donors meet-and-greet in the French Room of the Adolphus. The theater, he promised, would "liberate the stage from the shackles of tradition" and that Texas was just the place for it, given "all that money bubbling out of the ground." It was a good thing, too, because the estimated price tag had gone up, in typical Wright fashion, from $500,000 to more than $750,000. In the end, it would cost more than $1 million.

Two weeks later, the drive continued with a fundraiser featuring Moses himself: Charlton Heston, fresh off his star turn in the Ten Commandments, came to help part the financial waters. The last big check came from Mrs. R.W. Humphreys, a widowed philanthropist from Liberty. Her daughter, Kalita, had been a promising actress and had appeared in a Baker production before her marriage and subsequent death in a plane crash. Baker persuaded Mrs. Humphreys to donate the money to the theater in her honor. And so it had a name.

Conflict and construction

Wright selected Oliver, who is now 91 and living outside of Denver, to manage the project. He had been with the Wright Fellowship since 1949, and was conveniently already stationed in Dallas to oversee the construction of Wright's sprawling residence for John Gillen in Preston Hollow.

The chief obstacle was the site, or, to be more accurate, the acquisition thereof. The land was the property of Sylvan Baer, a reluctant philanthropist who seemed more interested in placing conditions on its use (so he might stay relevant) than in actually moving ahead.

Concerns about Baer had in part chased off other institutions that had considered the site, among them Temple Emanu-El, which commissioned a design for it from the German-Jewish émigré Erich Mendelsohn.

Now, with construction set to commence, Baer refused access, claiming he didn't want a two-way street running though the adjoining property, which was still his. In the courtroom of Sarah T. Hughes, who would later give the oath to Lyndon Johnson, Baer complained of "bums and lovers" on the grounds after nightfall.

Kalita Humphreys Theater is seen from across Turtle Creek, which was how architect Frank Lloyd Wright originally intended visitors to approach the theater. (Smiley N. Pool / Staff Photographer)

Baer lost the case, but the theater lost in its own way. The footprint of the site was reduced, and this eliminated the grand promenade Wright had envisioned, with a bridge crossing Turtle Creek and dramatically sweeping up to the entry. The theater also failed to acquire parking on the opposite, uphill side, so a path could be made under the MKT railroad tracks (now the Katy Trail).

The result is that today cars are parked in lots adjacent to the building, spoiling the view and negating the processional entry sequence that Wright imagined.

Despite a mutual respect, the Baker-Wright dynamic was also contentious, in that way anticipating the combative relationship between architect I. M. Pei and acoustician Russell Johnson in the design of the Meyerson Symphony Center. Wright was averse to consultants, and claimed he "tuned" his designs himself, a practice he learned from his own master, Louis Sullivan.

The greatest bone of contention was Wright's refusal to install an elevator to bring scenery from storage to stage level. He insisted on ramps, but Baker knew that the sheer weight and size of material made this impracticable. At an impasse, Wright summoned Baker to Taliesin West, his winter headquarters in the desert outside of Scottsdale. After having Baker sit and stew, Wright made his grand entrance and declared he was resigning in protest. "It's all off," he said. "No one has ever said to me that something I knew would work will not work. I don't want to have anything more to do with you or your theater. Good day, Mr. Baker."

Wright was persuaded to return to the job, but Baker still got his elevator. Oliver agreed to build it, and just hope Wright didn't find out. "I knew when Mr. Wright saw it I would be fired. He would not understand," says Oliver. "I was prepared to leave the fellowship very abruptly if he ever showed up."

He never did. Wright died on April 9, 1959, having never stepped foot in the theater he once claimed was the single project he wanted to see before his demise. The plans were by then largely complete, however, and under Oliver's direction it was finished according to Wright's all-encompassing vision.

One entered from a canopied terrace that pressed up against the chalky rock of the hill, creating a grotto-like space, an intimate experience augmented by a gently splashing fountain. A pair of tapered golden columns marked the boundary between the exterior and the glass-enclosed interior, the sequence defined by Wright's unusual geometry. Whereas most buildings are planned on a square grid, Wright designed the theater on a diamond plan, resulting in spaces that pulled you along their angles, there being nary a squared corner in sight.

1959 diamond-grid plan for the Dallas Theater Center, by Frank Lloyd Wright. (The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives|The Museum of Modern Art|The Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library)

The compressed space of the entry and foyer was released within the auditorium, an almost magical fan-shaped jewel-box entirely in gold. The seats were raked gently, and placed so that the audience was on eye level with the actors, to promote connection. The seats themselves were individually cantilevered, which left plenty of room for handbags and coats and made for easy maintenance. The acoustics, as Wright promised, were outstanding.

But the piece de resistance was the rotating circular stage, or more accurately the fly loft that hovered above it. This was a 40-foot-tall, 8-inch-thick concrete drum weighing 127 tons, and it was entirely cantilevered from the building's reinforced concrete trunk. Nearly 60 years later, it has barely — barely — deflected.

Wright's concrete forms had the ancillary benefit of insulating the theater from the adjacent and still-operational MKT rail line and planes overhead on final approach to Love Field.

Debut followed by decline

The Kalita did not have an opening night. That wasn't enough for Dallas. It had a five-day "gala premiere" that began with a press performance on Dec. 27, 1959. Virgil Miers, of the Times Herald, declared it a victory. "The theater is magnificent," he wrote. Plaudits came from celebrities, as well. Maurice Chevalier called it "revolutionary," and cartoonist Charles Addams thought it so chic that he wanted the roof terrace be named in his honor.

"We overheard nothing but approval," John Rosenfield reported, though he did allude to a lingering sore point, warning that it might "drive the technicians crazy."

Baker's inaugural production was an experimental staging of Thomas Wolfe's novel Of Time and the River, which Baker had debuted to acclaim earlier in the year at Baylor. It was an apt choice. As Rosenfield observed, Wolfe was a "cult" figure, "a genius who swamped an emotion or an incident in words which some regard as high poetic expression and others as too much of a not-so-good thing." The same, of course, could be said about Wright and his architecture.

"When you try to fight the building, the building will win and you will lose," says Kevin Moriarty, the DTC's current artistic director. "Many people, for many years — including me — have tried to fight the Kalita and push it toward the strengths of a proscenium theater, and each time you end up with an inadequate proscenium and failed art, because Wright's ideas are just so physically powerful."

But the converse is also true. "When you embrace the architecture and work in harmony with Wright's ideas, it opens up amazing artistic possibilities." A case in point was Moriarty's stripped-down staging of Inherit the Wind, the dramatization of the notorious Scopes monkey trial. "It allowed us to make very compelling images, and for the audience to encounter the play in a very fresh way," he says.

Actors from the Dallas Theater Center perform a scene from "Inherit The Wind" at the Kalita Humphreys Theater in Dallas on May 14, 2017. (Robert W. Hart / Special Contributor)

Our theater critic agreed. The production "succeeds in pivoting attention away from history and toward the still white-hot premise," wrote Nancy Churnin.

As successful as it initially was, the debut of the theater marked the beginning of an interminable series of alterations to the building forced by budget cuts made during construction; by issues Wright had either not considered or that cropped up later; and by shifting production requirements from the theater administration.

Among the first of these ill-conceived additions was an expansion of Baker's office, undertaken by Oliver and architect David George, with whom he had partnered after Wright's death. "Baker was a very demanding person, and he convinced me that he needed certain additions to the building and we did it. It shouldn't have been done," says Oliver . "You should never fiddle with a Frank Lloyd Wright design. I regret that we did that."

That was just the beginning. The drip of alterations kept coming and coming and coming, a slow-motion waterfall that compromised virtually every aspect of the theater.

In 1968, an addition dedicated to education and rehearsals replaced the terrace above the entry canopy, a bulky block that fundamentally changed the theater's appearance. But things just got worse. The rake of the theater was changed, and the golden seats replaced. The foyer was expanded, cannibalizing the grotto space, and eventually flipped around entirely so that the principal entrance was from the east. A sea of parking enveloped the building, marring it visually and eliminating any sense of procession.

A plan for a neighboring museum by the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange never got beyond preliminary drawings.

But the theater did get a neighbor: an unattractive auxiliary structure, the Heldt Administration Building, was constructed of cheap materials on a primary sight line. It is now a dilapidated eyesore. "It's just like a giant ice chest," says Carl Janak, an architect for the city who does what he can to look after the theater. "It's outlived its useful life.

"A pure disaster," says Oliver. "The sooner it comes down, the better."

An administrative orphan

The theater's physical deterioration was abetted by a kind of accidental administrative negligence. This was exacerbated in 2012, when the DTC moved into the Wyly Theater, in the Arts District, itself a work of avant-garde architecture tailored to the evolving needs of a contemporary theater company.

The move has left the Kalita as an architectural stepchild of financially challenged parents with differing agendas who don't want to accept responsibility for their ward. The lack of clear lines of authority is a typical problem for Dallas arts institutions, but the entanglement is particularly pronounced here. In the early 1980s, the city took ownership of the Kalita from the DTC, which remains its principal tenant, but subleases it out to other companies, most notably the Uptown Players, for whom it is something of a home base.

Within the city, however, responsibility is divided between the Office of Cultural Affairs, which controls the building, and the Dallas Park & Recreation Department, which controls the surrounding landscape. A 5-foot gray zone separates their respective territories.

This Kafka-esque arrangement is as unwieldy as you might expect, and with predictable results. For instance, when runoff from the bar began flowing into Wright's fountain, nobody would take responsibility because it straddled the architectural DMZ. And because nobody took care of it, at minimal cost, the fountain rusted out, and now must be replaced. That's a big cost.

Rust covers a non-functioning fountain outside the main entry at Kalita Humphreys Theater. (Smiley N. Pool / Staff Photographer)

It is a scenario that is repeated ad nauseam. When a bathroom faucet breaks, who deals with it? The Uptown Players? They're sub-lessees. The DTC? They're tenants. The OCA? That's too minor an issue for a city agency with many properties to manage, and anyway, how is it supposed to know how to replace a faucet in an architectural landmark? That would require a preservationist, or at least a set of guidelines on care and maintenance, and that doesn't exist.

Carl Janak, senior architect at city of Dallas. (Smiley N. Pool / Staff Photographer)

A new gatekeeper

Responsibility often falls to Janak, a city architect who looks after 900 buildings.

"There's no collective memory about what's been done, how it's been done, what plan they've used," says Abernathy. The conservancy would be responsible for that collective memory, and would assume control of the theater's maintenance and its programming — "a gatekeeper so that all those entities can operate in concert," says Abernathy.

A first priority would be raising the estimated $40 million for a complete restoration of the theater to Wright's original design conception, as the 2010 Master Plan directs. By that plan, the entry would be returned to its original orientation, with its relationship to the surrounding landscape restored. The auditorium itself would be returned to Wright's golden design, rather than the compromised version of today.

A new and less obtrusive administrative building would replace the crumbling Heldt, and would include a garage with enough spaces to keep cars clear of the procession through the landscape to the entry.

A preliminary site plan for the Kalita Humphreys Theater, illustrated in the 2010 Master Plan created by the City of Dallas (City of Dallas)

Dallas, finally and for the first time, would have the Wright theater it deserves, the only one designed during his lifetime. Joining such icons as the Guggenheim Museum and the Marin County Civic Center, it would stand as an example of Wright's late style of bold, monumental form. The city that loves to sell itself would have another significant tourist attraction.

If this sounds overly ambitious and implausible, consider the fact that Buffalo, N.Y. — a rust-belt city of marginal economic vitality — recently raised more than $50 million for the restoration of Wright's 1906 Darwin Martin Residence, including the construction of a glassy new welcome center by the architect Toshiko Mori. It is now one of the most popular sites in the city, and an economic success story.

And yet there is resistance, even from those who care deeply about the Kalita. The 2017 Dallas bond program recently approved by voters includes only $525,000 for the theater, for dire repair work.

"This isn't pressing at this moment," says Moriarty, who is also the chair of the Dallas Arts District, which represents all of the institutions that comprise it. "Whether the city should be prioritizing the Kalita compared to the other arts needs the city has, I would say no."

It is an understandable attitude. But to move forward on the master plan for the Kalita is not to siphon funds from the city's other arts needs — in the Arts District and beyond it. A central function of the conservancy would be to privately raise the necessary dollars for the restoration.

This cuts to the crux of the problem, with the Kalita and for Dallas more generally. It is why Fair Park is still parking and why there is no park in the Trinity. The city makes plans and plans and plans, never acting on them, always kicking the can just a little farther down the road. All that planning gives the impression of progress, without resolving any of the sticky political and financial challenges genuine progress entails.

You can see this process happening here. The Kalita master plan will be deemed outdated (it's not), requiring more time and more money for a new plan, which will sit on a shelf until it, too, is deemed outdated, and the cycle begins again.

Dallas boosters tell anyone who'll listen that "big things happen here." Sometimes they do. But the restoration of one of the city's crown jewels is not that big a thing, and it is stalled.

Put up or shut up.

Editor's note: Mark Lamster is the architecture critic of The Dallas Morning News, a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington School of Architecture.