o get to know Ray Nasher, it helps to don a hardhat and do a construction-site circuit. That is, two construction-site circuits: Nasher is the prime patron of museums in progress at Duke, from which he graduated in 1943, and in Dallas, his adopted hometown.

Early in March, Nasher, along with architect Rafael Viñoly and Duke museum director Michael Mezzatesta, were walking the Duke site. Construction had started just weeks earlier. They were looking at a sample of pre-cast concrete, four feet by four feet, that had been trucked in from Charlotte. Pigment had been used to tint the concrete light brown, and small stones in shades of brown, beige, and white had been added to provide more color and texture. They were also considering the width of the reveals, or raised surfaces, that would add visual relief once the flat panels of concrete were put in place. From the beginning of the Duke museum project, says Mezzatesta, Nasher's vision has been "to hire a world-class architect to design a significant building."

Designing for Duke

In Texas, later in March, Vel Hawes, whose business card reads "Owner's Representative," was leading a tour through the half-finished Nasher Sculpture Center. It will occupy a former parking lot, adjacent to the Dallas Museum of Art. The first obvious feature is "an instant forest"--some 180 re-planted, fully mature trees. Then there are two soaring sculptures. Mark di Suvero's Eviva Amore, made of steel, is thirty-five-feet high and weighs 22,500 pounds. Richard Serra's My Curves Are Not Mad combines two forty-foot-long steel plates arranged in a precise alignment; its installation required flatbed trucks, cranes, and special lifting clamps, along with its own concrete foundation.

For both projects, Nasher isn't just the conceiving force but also a continuing presence. Hawes talks about Nasher's tendency to "be a perfectionist in everything he does." The architect for the Duke building, Viñoly, was runner-up in the competition to rebuild the World Trade Center. The Dallas building and sculpture garden is a collaboration between Renzo Piano, winner of the Pritzker Prize, architecture's ultimate mark of distinction, and landscape architect Peter Walker. At its core is the collection assembled by Nasher and his late wife, Patsy, which is probably the world's most impressive array of modern sculpture in private hands.

Above: The Gossiper II, Jean Dubuffet, 1969-70 (fabricated 1984). Painted polyester resin. 120 x 81 3/4 x 85 1/4 in. Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Dallas, Texas. photo by David Heald

Above: Torso with Buds, Jean Hans Arp, 1961. Bronze with brown patina. 73 7/8 x 15 1/2 x 15 in. Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Dallas, Texas. photo by David Heald

In Dallas, the twin design themes are Italian travertine and transparency, a merger of inside and outside, art and nature. Visitors will be able to gaze up through glass ceilings to the sky. They will be able to stand in front and look all the way through the building to the garden beyond, or stand in the garden and look into the interior installations. The glass panels on the roof are covered with a cast aluminum "sunscreen," with small hoods that will pop upward or downward. Top-layer hoods will capture a steady northern light and bounce it through lower hoods, giving the light an even, diffused distribution in the galleries. The effect is "pure, pure, pure," in the words of center director Steven Nash.

Hawes pauses in the main exhibition gallery, where two supervisors are selecting travertine tiles. He says Nasher tells contractors to "keeping raising the bar," to "make it the best you can make it." He adds, "He can't read a construction plan in a technical sense, but once he sees it, he understands it. If you're explaining it to him, he's sizing you up. His greatest strength is his intuition. He won't make a decision until it feels good."

Duke's Nasher Museum is scheduled to open in late 2004. Dallas' Nasher Sculpture Center opens this fall. Already, Hawes has led some 300 tours, at the behest of interested--and envious--architects, museum executives, and art dealers. "This is a very complex building that, when finished, will look very simple."

That's how Ray Nasher does things--initiating complex processes that make strong and simple statements. To him, art changes everything, including how we perceive the world and how we perceive ourselves. "When you look at art that you bought thirty years ago, which gave you butterflies at that time, it may be more stimulating today," he says. "You can see a Picasso today and think it's the most beautiful and exciting thing. And then three months later, it's still a fabulous piece of art, but suddenly a Matisse comes into play and that Matisse is much more meaningful."

" The problem that I have with people who don't really relate to art is that they're always looking through things," he says. "They don't see anything."

Nasher, an only child, was born in Boston; his father had escaped the pogroms of Russia, and his mother had immigrated from Germany. He went to Boston Latin, the first public school in the United States, which dates back to the 1630s and is still considered one of the best in the country. The school is close to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. "From the time I was six or seven years old, the three of us went to museums. There were something like twenty-seven museums in the Boston area," Nasher says. His first fixation with a work of art was Van Gogh's Postman, which he kept re-encountering at the M.F.A. "It was captivating. The colors had a tremendous meaning--the postman's uniform and hat. And the expressiveness of the face. The postman came alive. One could see right through to the character of the person."

He was exposed not just to art, but also to an open-ended intellectual curiosity. His grandparents lived in the Bronx in New York, next to Yankee Stadium. When he visited, he'd accompany them to baseball games, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and some unexpected destinations. "My grandfather was a very interesting man. Anything that happened in New York, he knew about it. So we had to go up the Empire State Building, the George Washington Bridge, the day they were opened."

During the Depression, the family moved to New York for what his father hoped would be better economic opportunities in the garment-manufacturing business. Twice a week Nasher studied piano at a branch of the Juilliard School of Music (now The Juilliard School) in Queens. Every Saturday he had composition and harmony lessons at Juilliard in Manhattan. He still keeps a piano in his library.

Eager to experience life beyond New England and the Northeast, Nasher went to Duke. He majored in economics and never took a college-level art course. As a senior, he became president of the Men's Student Government Association. The Chronicle reported at the time that Nasher had "left, returned, left, and returned again to the campus because of the Navy's calling him to active duty as an ensign in the supply corps." Nasher had his own Chronicle column, "Time to Think." He promoted the virtues of physical education as "a definite contribution to our country's war efforts," pleaded with fraternities to abide by their own rules of behavior, and pondered the question, "Can you tell me why Man has been working for war rather than for peace ever since the founding of his universe?" In one of his last columns, in April 1943, he dwelled on "Duke deficiencies." He wrote, "Duke needs an art and music school. Our university should enfold culture of every nature. Art and music are basic cultural entities which must not be lost in the shuffle of 'bread and butter' seekers."

Morton Heller '42, now a retired bank chairman in Aspen, Colorado, coached Nasher on the freshman tennis team, was Nasher's roommate for three years, and managed his publicity when Nasher made a successful run for the class presidency. He remembers Nasher as "a smart, very steady player" for the varsity tennis team, of which he was captain, and whose matches Nasher's parents often came to see. And, says Heller, he was known around campus as "one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet." They continued to play tennis together for more than fifty years.

After Duke, Nasher returned to Boston and enrolled in a graduate program at Boston University, concentrating on housing and urban development. "Maturity suggests that you know what you don't want to do; you may not know what you do want to do," Nasher says. "I knew that I didn't want to be in my father's garment business."

Nasher was determined to land someplace where the entrepreneurial environment would allow him to make his mark. His wife, the former Patsy Rabinowitz, was a Dallas native, so both were drawn to Dallas. (They had met at an election-night party in 1948, the first election to be televised. As Nasher recalls it, Patsy Rabinowitz was the only one at the gathering to predict a Truman victory.) Struck by the postwar exuberance for home ownership, a trend boosted by generous government financing, Nasher got his start as a developer of low-cost housing. He mastered the essentials: water, sewer, and natural-gas lines, power grids, zoning regulations, landscaping possibilities.

Beyond his Dallas base, Nasher has exerted an influence in other ways. In the administration of Lyndon Johnson, he was a delegate to the United Nations, executive director of a White House Conference on International Cooperation, a consultant to the State Department's Bureau of the Budget, and a member of a federal advisory committee on urban development. He served on the Kaiser Commission, appointed by Johnson in 1967 to report on the nation's urban areas. The commission reached conclusions that reflected a spirit of social progressiveness. It found, for example, that "Public expenditures for decent housing for the nation's poor, like public expenditures for education and job training, are not so much expenditures as they are essential investments in the future of American society."

The first President George Bush tapped him to serve on the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities; he continues as vice chairman. And he has had several university teaching stints, including three years at Harvard's Graduate School of Education.

Probably the most enduringly impressive outcome of Nasher's development work is NorthPark Center, opened in 1965 and located at the convergence of two Dallas highways. Today its 120 stores include upscale retailers like Neiman Marcus, Burberry, and Tiffany, along with The Gap, the Disney Store, Banana Republic, and other mall staples.