Revealed: Museum Place Post Office

The first rendering of the new Post Office to be built as part of the Museum Place project in the Cultural District has been released. Not the greatest rendering, but it’s all we have thus far. Click the thumbnail for a larger version. Museum Place’s press release about the building follows. The Post Office is being designed by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc. of Philadelphia.

The Museum Place Development Group has announced the location of a new 6,000 square-foot post office that will serve as the gateway into the highly anticipated Museum Place development in Fort Worth’s world-renowned cultural district. Groundbreaking on the new post office is expected to take place in late 2006 or early 2007. The post office, a full retail service center, will be located at the corner of Bailey Avenue and University Drive and will be accessible from 6th Street off Bailey.

Generous donations from local foundations funded the enhanced architectural elements of the building, done by the Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc., of Philadelphia. The design work will include a mural of the West Texas sky on the outside wall facing south and the north wall will be floor-to-ceiling glass. Just south of the building are steel billboard beams bent during the 2000 tornado that will serve as an art piece, set in a public plaza. Hahnfeld, Hoffer and Stanford, of Fort Worth, is the architect of record who will be completing the detailed construction drawings for the projects.

Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates was founded by the husband and wife team of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. The company’s most recent projects include an addition to Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia, the California Nanosystems Institute at the University of California in Santa Barbara and the Dumbarton Oaks Library in Washington, D.C. When complete, the post office will be the fifth building in the cultural district to be designed by a winner of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize. The post office will serve as a unique gateway into the Museum Place development, both in function and design.

“We have loved the problem of designing for a small but important public structure in a big Texan environment,” said Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. “The building must have civic scale, cultural relevance, local intimacy and visibility through the intersection at West 7th Street, Bailey Avenue and Camp Bowie Boulevard.”