Four decades ago, in May of 1980, Blondie was at the top of the charts, The Shining was winning at the box office, and the Dallas skyline was a mainstay of national television. It was there in prime time every Friday night, accompanied by that indelible propulsive score: the bleached grass between the Trinity levees giving way, with the camera’s rise, to a gleaming glass city of possibility. And then the title, all-caps in yellow outline: DALLAS.
It looked so, so glamorous, which was the point. Dallas the show was the epitome of Dallas the city: wealthy, brash, beautiful and indisputably No. 1. Alas, it was fiction. Dallas looked good in a montage on the small screen, but the reality? In that same month of May 1980, the cover of D Magazine asked an uncomfortable question that spoke a different truth: “Why Is Dallas Architecture So Bad?”
The story should have come with a sound effect: air rushing out of a balloon — fsssssssst. It so punctured the inflated Dallas self-image that this paper, in the interest of boosting civic aspirations, hired its author, David Dillon, as architecture critic.
Forty years later, with the coronavirus forcing us to rethink the ways in which we inhabit the city, we find ourselves at an opportune moment to take stock, to see how Dallas has progressed in the intervening years, and to imagine how it might remake itself for the better. And so to the titular question, but with a twist: Is Dallas architecture still so bad?
There is only one possible answer, and it defines this city of oppositions and contradictions: yes and no.
What was wrong?
But let’s go back to 1980. What was so wrong back then? Dillon’s account begins with the scathing dismissal by — and this really hurt — a corporate architect from Houston. “Dallas is a ‘gimme another one of those’ city when it comes to architecture. Very conservative, uneasy with anything new. I couldn’t sell an angle there to save my life.”
Dallas was too conservative, too rule-bound, too obsessed with short-term economic gain, too devoted to the automobile, too lacking in vision from its business and civic leadership. There was no culture of architecture. The only school of architecture was the fledgling program at the University of Texas at Arlington, and that wasn’t even in the city proper.
The result: boring, insular buildings and empty streets. “You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of downtown commercial buildings that acknowledge the existence of a pedestrian public.”
To hear Dillon tell it, Dallas just barely had a skyline, and that was only thanks to the recently completed Reunion Tower and attached Hyatt Regency. If you had to take a visitor from out of town to one place in the city to make an impression, this was it. Granted, it’s hard not to love the place in all its reflective glory, but the less glamorous truth is that it’s an auto-centric convention hotel stuck on the wrong side of the railroad tracks.
The state of affairs was best articulated by architect Henry Cobb, who would go on to build what remains the best office tower in Dallas: Fountain Place. “Dallas is now at a crossroads,” he told Dillon. “On the one hand, it has to avoid purely arbitrary invention, mere thingery; on the other, it has to avoid creating dozens of homogenized buildings that are simply dropped onto a site and left. The goal is to create a true urban context.”
Dallas in 2020
OK. Now let’s return to the present and play Dillon’s game: If that visitor were returning to Dallas for the first time after 40 years, where would he or she go?
The answer is obvious, and speaks to the city’s positive evolution over the ensuing decades: Klyde Warren Park. With it, Dallas now has a legitimate front door and civic gathering space, not coincidentally situated over a highway. The park has made Dallas an unlikely national model of progressive urban design, although its founders seem determined to compromise it with an ill-conceived expansion project and a gimmicky fountain.
The emergence of the Bishop Arts District as a pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use community of small, independent businesses has been another positive story that has made national headlines. But like Klyde Warren, it has struggled with its success, beset by developer-driven overbuilding and the gentrification of legacy Latino families and businesses.
When Dallas has tried to do “big development,” the results have been poor. Despite massive public investment, Victory Park is only just emerging from its status as an anodyne, corporate non-place into an area that bears a semblance of humanity.
As it stands now, there are a series of megaprojects on the horizon — for the area behind City Hall, and for spaces linking Victory and downtown — that could fall prey to the same, placeless overbuilding.
On a purely formal level, Dillon’s call for an ambitious architecture was answered with a fair number of signature buildings by signature architects, including a landing strip of trophy buildings in the Arts District. The results are of varied merit, from the wonderful (the Nasher), to the curious (the Wyly Theatre), to the downright egregious (Museum Tower).
The city’s taste for Statement Architecture is best exemplified by the pair of white hoop bridges designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. They make a statement, certainly, but what exactly is it? Yes, they are pretty. But they are also over-priced, over-designed, over-built, needlessly showy, and absent promised paths for bikes and pedestrians. They represent precisely the “thingery” that Cobb warned of in 1980.
More troubling is that Cobb’s fear of a plopped-down, homogeneous architecture and lack of urban context has also come to fruition.
To see this phenomenon, one need only travel through Uptown or West Dallas, which have been overrun by a typology that has come to define Dallas architecture: the beige apartment block, four to five stories tall, of no discernible style, and taking up a full city block. Entire neighborhoods have been wiped away and replaced with this kind of cheap, generic building that makes no accommodation to anything but a developer’s balance sheet.
It is true that these types of buildings are a national scourge, but their presence is perhaps worse in Dallas, where they both exacerbate and are exacerbated by the city’s other challenges; in particular, the disastrous state of its sidewalks and streets. One lousy building in a dense urban grid is easily overlooked; one lousy building standing nakedly in open space along a high-speed artery is a much bigger problem.
Enhancing the city’s connective tissue is the single most important thing that can be done for Dallas architecture. If the COVID-19 era has shown us anything, it is the necessity for expanded sidewalks (without constant blockages), more trees to provide shade and to reduce the heat island effect, a protected network of bike lanes, and an end to “radiused” corners (that privilege turning cars over pedestrians). Dallas needs a diet—a road diet.
Escaping corporatism
Much of the city’s bad building is a product of its vigorous economy. Developers can be expected to prioritize profit over civic good, especially corporations from out of town, who have their out-of-town architects drop cookie-cutter projects in our streets.
The city’s large architecture firms are certainly not blameless, though the standard of their output has improved over the past four decades. Stalwarts like Corgan, Gensler, HKS, Omniplan, and Perkins and Will reliably produce solid — and on occasion exceptional — work. Indeed, architecture has become a net export for Dallas, with firms practicing not just locally but internationally.
Maturation of the school of architecture at UTA (where I am a professor) has contributed to this growth; the school has become a mill for the city’s architecture industry, and its enrollment is growing and diverse — an important factor is a profession that has a poor record on that front.
But the truth is that the city’s vigorous architecture business has not translated into a vigorous creative culture. The product: a spate of generic office towers in reflective glass.
I’m not opposed to glass towers, but there is no excuse for banality, and too many glass boxes — even good ones — can lead to sterile, inhospitable spaces. There are other, inventive and efficient ways to clad buildings. One of the city’s best, the Republic Center, is dressed in punchy patterned aluminum. Also to be avoided are tack-on LED lighting displays, cheap substitutes for real, three-dimensional architectural expression.
City regulations also stifle better design impulses, especially parking requirements that no longer make sense when the city should be embracing expanding public transit options, walkability and the benefits of shared commuting.
As it is, Dallas has few of the kind of small, independent practices that drive architectural innovation. Women and minority-led firms are rare. No Dallas architect has won the prestigious Emerging Voices award from the Architectural League of New York, the profession’s most important signal of promising talent, since Gary Cunningham and that was all the way back in 1994.
What is the problem? In the city’s corporate environment, it can be hard for a young firm to gain purchase. The small, civic projects that are the lifeblood of fledgling practices are here dominated by the big guns, who can out-compete the smaller-fry with bigger budgets and manpower. Teaching opportunities are confined to UTA, which remains outside the city center, in suburban Arlington, its focus divided between Dallas and Fort Worth and the rest of North Texas.
These conditions explain why the most significant independent studio to have emerged in the city is the nonprofit BC Workshop, which takes on the kind of public-interest work that falls outside the standard purview of corporate architectural practice. With projects like the Congo Street Initiative and the Cottages at Hickory Crossing, the firm manages to fuse community development with modern design excellence — a rare feat.
In addition to its architecture work, BC engages in urban advocacy projects, a good number of them focused on preservation of communities that have been traditionally neglected.
It is impossible to think about the quality of Dallas architecture without also thinking about its preservation, which has never been a civic priority. Dallas has consistently and persistently destroyed itself for the same reason that it has been attracted to Statement Architecture — because creating the new splashy thing suggests that it is new, that it is relevant, that it is, yes, great.
But Dallas isn’t a new city anymore, and it hasn’t been for a long time. If you are perpetually knocking down your architecture, the message you’re sending as to its value is clear: It is a disposable commodity, and nothing more.
Dallas, we might say, is at a crossroads again. We’ve driven a long way, and made some progress, but somehow it seems we’re back at the same intersection we were at 40 years ago.
Maybe this time we should fix it?
