The magazine’s table is four deep from the aisle in a crowd of more than 100 tables, adrift in a sea of laundered men in suits – grey, deep blue, black – and a diluted scattering of women, their gender apparent by smart, fitted jackets that offer occasional dollops of beige and light blue.

It is the annual Downtown Dallas Inc. meeting, and though we are in the belly of the much ballyhooed new Omni Dallas Hotel, we could be anywhere. ..read more

If you haven’t checked out this article from yesterday’s New York Times, do so. It suggests rethinking the parking lot, that source of urban blight which we all claim to hate, and yet, “we continue to produce parking lots, in cities as well as in suburbs, in the same way we consume all those billions of plastic bottles of water and disposable diapers.”

In short, the parking lot isn’t going away, and while we should reverse the policies that have led to the creation of eight parking spaces for every car in the country, we should also start thinking of parking lots as real public spaces. The article outlines a few ideas, from landscaping to utilizing the space for pop-up marketplaces, that support taking lots more seriously rather than merely continuing to ignore them.

The New York Times this week takes a look at a new exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York that celebrates that city’s 200-year-old street grid plan. A product of big government and bold thinking, the piece remarks, the street grid serves as a role model for how we can approach the daunting problems of the 21st century with the grit and vision of another era.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the glimpses of the museum exhibition ..read more

Last week, the Dallas Architecture Forum invited architect Qingyun Ma to Dallas. Born in China and now teaching and practicing in Los Angeles, Ma was intimately involved in Rem Koolhaas’ “Harvard Project on the City,” in which the Danish architect brought students to China to study the emergence of a new kind of urban form. In part one of my interview with Qingyun Ma, we talk about that project and the emergence of a city that confounds western assumptions about ..read more

When the Dallas Opera announced that it was cutting a production from its 2011-2012 season, it was pretty clear about where it laid at least some of the blame:

While this move benefitted the company in important ways and contributed significantly to both the critical and popular success of our subsequent productions in the new, purpose-built venue, the change also had a dramatic impact on the number of patrons who could be accommodated at any given performance, falling from more than 3,400 to a seating capacity of 2,200.

In other words, “Thanks for our new, pretty opera, but it’s killing us.”

Those concerns have been picked up upon in an article in Fastco Design which looks at the architect Norman Foster’s string of “unlucky” projects in America. The opera’s problems, the article reminds us, are not the architect’s fault. The size of the theater was determined by a steering committee which oversaw the development. The decision to perform in repertory was made possible by the new house, but ultimately it was one made by the Dallas Opera. And it is hard to sympathize with complaints over the cost of operating the new building considering the opera has been dreaming of moving out of Fair Park and into a “world class” facility for decades. “World class” venues carry “world class” costs.

But the Winspear is only one of Foster’s troublesome projects in the United States. Some projects, such as a proposed Globe theater redo for New York’s Governors Island, never got off the ground. A Seattle project has fallen victim to the financial crisis. And his Hearst Tower project in New York has made it into the running for one of the ugliest buildings in that city.

This summer we are launching a series of articles that will look at Dallas’ architecture and urban form from a pedestrian perspective. We are not going to opine about what needs to be done to make this city more of a sensible place for citizens on foot. Rather, we’re going to look at how Dallas exists today, and specifically, how the tangle of plans, architecture, and ideas across the decades have created a strange, illogical, frustrating, but also sometimes pleasant and surprising urban environment.

To start: a simple thing I discovered one day when I went to walk from D Magazine’s offices at the corner of Ross Ave. and St. Paul St. (across from the Dallas Museum of Art) to the Dallas Public Library. With St. Paul under construction due to the expansion of First Baptist, I avoided a direct route. What I found was the kind of thing that is often pictured and idealized in New Urbanist plans: a street level pedestrian walkway that stretches from the north end of Downtown/arts district to the government district. Sure, it doesn’t look like the wonderful Fußgänger-Plätze that you can find in nearly every German city and town and which are often pictured in urban plans, but it serves the same purpose. Let’s start. (more…)

Any Dallas parent knows the health risks that accompany allowing their child to run and play outside all summer. Luckily Dallas offers plenty of theater and arts programs throughout the summer.

(more…)

You may have already read Patrick Kennedy’s column on the Arts District in the June issue of D, but if you haven’t check it out.

Patrick makes a suggestion for the re-purposing of decommissioned DISD portable classrooms. It’s an idea that has been floating around in various forms since our panel discussion on the Arts District last fall: if the problem with the district is density of use and function, why not add that density by introducing portable structures into the district? Think of an urban bazaar, where small buildings propped against some of the less visually-appealing areas of the district could house shops, eateries, studios, and more. From Patrick’s piece:

[Portables] could be repurposed for small businesses and entrepreneurs who otherwise couldn’t afford downtown rents. The parking lot owner gets rent for the spaces the portable occupies, and the city gets improved urban form as the ugly interior of the parking lot is hidden by a curtain of portables—aka storefronts. Parking lots tend to have a corrosive effect on surrounding properties, so anything is better than nothing (or just parked cars). Even better, once they do their job in one place, the portables can be relocated to resuscitate another struggling block someplace else.

One of the problems with the design of the district is that it contains much empty space. We’re not just talking about the to-be developed portions. Think about the wall of the Dallas Museum of Art between Flora and the future Woodall Park site, or that same stretch next to the Nasher. Or what about the backside of the Cathedral? Or Pearl St? There is a lot of space in the Arts District that is already designed to be useless from a pedestrian perspective. From Patrick’s piece:

The Arts District acts as a port for North Texas, importing internationally produced art and culture. But it’s a one-way relationship. Its imposing architectural trophies designed by Pritzker winners have thus far not proved hospitable to a robust ecology of human activity. We wanted a vibrant Arts District, but we hired an architect who explicitly wanted to disorient visitors, make them uncomfortable as they entered his building. Job well done, Joshua Prince-Ramus. . . .

The Arts District venues were expensive to build, but the dead zone around them can be jump-started on the cheap. The big buildings need some fine-grain detail to touch and feel. Let’s line the streets and blocks of the Arts District with DISD portables recycled as studios and showrooms where local artists can express themselves while providing daytime interest and activity in the district.

I like this idea in theory, but there are problems (and not just that it sounds really ugly). First off,  I really don’t like this ongoing talk about bringing working artists to the Arts District. If we are talking about trying to create more pedestrian life in the district, more use of public space, and more vibrant day-to-day activity by infusing life into the area, artist studios are not the answer. When was the last time you woke up, grabbed a sandwich, and ran by a local artist studio to watch an artist stare at his or her painting for an hour in order to determine if it was finished or not? Right, never.

Let’s pull back out our Jane Jacobs: street life is generated in areas that serve as intersections of a variety of functions. The problem with the Arts District is mono-functionality is written into its very concept. What it needs is more functions. Restaurants and eateries help, but what about a cafe, or a dentist, or a shoe repair, or any number of the practicals services that are buried under downtown Dallas? What about a place to buy cigarettes or cigars that you could smoke in the park? Or a small shop that sells doggy treats and donuts for the One Arts residents who walk their dogs through the district? Or a bookshop that pulls from the individual book stores at each of the district’s museums?

I’m sure you could come up with another dozen ideas for the kinds of shops that would be interesting to stumble upon in the Arts District, but I list these ideas to make a point. Space is only one of the issues with bringing life to the district, filling those spaces with viable stores is another one. Finding shop operators is not easy. Who is going to invest in an area that has no foot traffic today? Should the city subsidize these operators until they get on their feet? Should the Arts District? Would the institutions pay more dues to put functions in front of their buildings that don’t necessarily mean increased audience, ticket sales, revenue? Maybe. Maybe not.

There are other questions. Could you open any kind of cafe, restaurant, food spot near the AT&T Performing Arts Center? No. Wolfgang Puck would throw kitchen knives at you. Could you open a bookstore that culls from the museum’s shops? Why would the museums allow something to open that would divert people from their own gift shops?

I think this idea has legs. We have to think of other ways to introduce life into the district, and that life needs to take the form of services that are not arts-oriented. But all the Arts District is is space, and it is what fills that space that makes it interesting, enjoyable, and of civic value. If we are going to introduce more space in the form of shops, the real trick will be determining who — if anyone — would be willing to fill it with quality uses.

One of the obstacles of the design of the new Calatrava Bridge spanning the Trinity River flood plain has been the power substation that sits right in line with where the bridge will eventually let off traffic. Once upon a time, the power station’s location was considered out of the way, but now, it is a seen as a blight on the hoped-to-be-lovely new and improved West Dallas. That’s why the City Design Studio has issued an open call for proposals to “re-imagine the external appearance of the power substation.” The studio began accepting submissions yesterday, but act fast: the deadline for proposals is June July 8.

I like Bethany’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion for the project that she posted to FrontBurner yesterday. After all, this is every bit a lipstick on a pig project. In the comments to this Dallas Observer story on the project, there is a much simpler and rather novel idea: trees. But you never know what you’ll get when you throw a bunch of creatives at a project, especially when there is a stipend in play for $5,000 – $8,000. So we’ll wait and see what proposals come in.

For now, here’s my idea for sweeping that nasty power substation under the proverbial rug: a giant blown-up version of Danny Williams drawing Pleine de la Maule, 2007 (pictured above) – mural-sized, like a giant billboard blocking our view of the power station.

The Nasher Sculpture Center, The Rachofsky House, and a handful of other organziatoins are partnering for a weeklong summer architecture workshop for high school students.

Join architect and educator Peter Goldstein, AIA, for a week-long workshop exploring some of the most talked-about and innovative structures in Dallas. Participants will visit buildings designed by a host of the world’s leading architects including Pritzker Prize Laureates Renzo Piano, Richard Meier, Norman Foster, Thom Mayne and I. M. Pei.

Not a bad way to spend a week in June. Here’s the full release:

(more…)

That’s what University of North Carlina professor and urban planner Thomas Campanella argues in this long, but fascinating overview of what has happned to urban planning in the wake of Jacobs’ influence. The problem, Campagnella writes, is that planners no longer know what their role is in a city, and they lack the power to effect real change. As a result, the “Tools and processes introduced to ensure popular participation ended up reducing the planner’s role to that of umpire or schoolyard monitor. Instead of setting the terms of debate or charting a course of action, planners now seemed content to be facilitators — “mere absorbers of public opinion,” as Alex Krieger put it, “waiting for consensus to build.”

This brings us to the first of the three legacies of the Jacobsian turn: It diminished the disciplinary identity of planning. . . .

The second legacy of the Jacobsian revolution is related to the first: Privileging the grassroots over plannerly authority and expertise meant a loss of professional agency. . . .

The third legacy of the Jacobsian turn is perhaps most troubling of all: the seeming paucity among American planners today of the speculative courage and vision that once distinguished this profession.

Image: “Construction Potentials: Postwar Prospects and Problems, a Basis for Action,” Architectural Record, 1943; prepared by the F.W. Dodge Corporation Committee on Postwar Construction Markets. [Drawing by Julian Archer]

If you haven’t checked out D Magazine’s great new commercial real estate blog, RealPoints, go do it. It is not just for square foot junkies. Urban anesthetists like to wax on about the future mobility in the city; the need for streetcars or rapid bus transit; our desire to have dense, walkable neighborhoods while weaning off the automobile; or even the fanciful notions of dismantling the highways infrastructure that are the products of a profit model that favors growth via the transformation of empty space into urban space (which is also a root cause of a city without any physical heart, a slackened sense of community and communal space, and demoralized sense of itself). Real estate leaders, however, continue to view the problem through antiquated goggles.

Case in point: Hillwood Properties Mike Berry writes a piece this morning on RealPoints which argues that the Texas Legislature needs to find ways to continue to divert funding to expanding “critical projects, such as the North Tarrant Express, DFW Connector, LBJ Express, and sections of State Highway 183 and Interstate-35E.”

While I recognize that traffic congestion and strangled movability can have a detrimental effect on economic growth, what is implicit in the piece is that future growth and development in the region will continue to generate in the same patterns that is has over the last fifty years, namely clusters of office pods in former cornfields stung together by a web of interlacing interstates. It is a pattern that has proven unsustainable. One indication of that is the fact that Legislature can no longer fund such projects – even if real estate developers believe the state should forgo other priorities to continue to feed the glut.

If urban advocates want to have a real effect on the future of Dallas, they need to take the battle to the corner offices of this city’s real estate corporations. They need to convince those who are pushing for highway and development business-as-usual that there is another way to view their business, a way that embraces both human scale and an adequate profit margin.

Photo via wikicommons.

Writing in the Dallas Morning News, Scott Cantrell says the city should not move ahead with plans for a second Calatrava Bridge over the Trinity River. Cantrell says the I-30 design if “[f]ar from the Spanish architect’s best work, it’s unworthy as a tribute to Margaret McDermott, the great Dallas philanthropist it’s supposed to honor . . .  As bridge architecture, though, it’s pure platitude, without an ounce of inspiration. Admittedly it’s really hard to make a 12-lane bridge — what’s proposed there — elegant.”

Cantrell’s solution? Go back to Calatrava and force him to design an I-30 bridge that falls into the Texas Department of Transportation’s current budget for the I-30 bridge replacement, or go to TxDOT and force them to design something more visually appealing than the usual High Five concrete flyovers.

Sounds very sensible to me.

It has been twenty years since Archinect Senior Editor Namanand Henderson traveled to Dallas. On a recent trip, he notices that much has changed. Here are some highlights from the piece:

The Dallas (DFW) airport is an aerotropolis, mega in scale. So is the city. The two merge at some point along 114. Last time I was in Dallas was almost twenty years ago. The years have been good to the Downtown. I arrive at night via cab. There is lot’s of money evident in all the brightly, lit buildings, like billboards visible from the interstate. . . .

While all of the architecture is of a high, professional caliber each of the recently completed buildings featured one or more details that particularly resonated with me. The Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House (by Foster + Partners), sits in Annette Strauss Artist Square where even the lawns are sponsored, and features a loud red, flying saucer-like aesthetic.Yet, this heft of the red performance spaces is matched by a large and metallic louvered system, which provides shade and mass to create a more layered edge to its envelope. This building in particular already against the freeway will have an especially new facade to present of itself. In this connection I noticed that the raw concrete, northern “rear” featured a delicate pattern of wire hardware to support a growing, green growth.

“Are architects cultured designers or glorified triage surgeons working in towns and cities lacerated by architectural collateral damage caused by political and commercial expediency, rubber-stamped by planners?” That’s the question Jay Merrick raises in this Independent article provocatively titled “The Death of Architecture.”

From design to delivery, architecture is being corporatised and re-calibrated as part of sophisticated management systems. Architects are increasingly seen as service-industry operatives and it cannot be long before student architects’ reading lists include tomes on the management and production structures of exemplars of global corporate efficiency such as Toyota, Walmart and Tesco.

Most architects spend about 5 per cent of their time actually designing, partly because they’re up to their necks in gruelling, and often turgidly repetitive, consultations and client meetings. Their early designs are fed through clients’ value-engineering software, and if the projected commercial outcomes don’t match client expectations, the idea is shredded. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it encourages passively compromised design and, ultimately, architecturally dumbed-down places.

Image: Toyota headquarters

There’s an interesting article on Slate by Witold Rybczynski which looks at how the use of computer design programs has affected the discipline of architects. 

I remember, as an architecture student in the 1960s, painstakingly inking drawings, stenciling lettering, coloring prints with pastel pencils. These operations required a lot of preparation as well as time management, since you couldn’t just throw things together at the last minute. Discipline was also a hallmark of the École des Beaux-Arts, the Parisian architectural school that dominated teaching in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Given an architectural program for a building, the student was required to produce, quickly, a parti, or architectural concept. The rest of the time was spent refining—but not altering—the parti into a finished building design. In part, this was an exercise in developing the ability to quickly deduce the crux of a problem. It was also a recognition that stick-to-it-ness was essential in the lengthy process of architectural design, especially as the large, elaborate watercolor renderings required by the Beaux-Arts took weeks of meticulous work. . . .

The fierce productivity of the computer carries a price—more time at the keyboard, less time thinking.

You can now add Eduardo Souto de Moura to the list of architects suitable to undertake high profile Dallas architecture projects. That’s because the Portuguese architect has won the 2011 Pritzker Prize. Here’s more on the architect with a slide show of his notable work.

Kerry J Haynes used to live in Chicago. Now he is a special assistant to the mayor in Memphis. When he read Blair Kamin’s critique of the Dallas Arts District in the Chicago Tribune, he was moved to respond to the piece. Haynes didn’t think Kamin went far enough with his critique, and the topic hit home because Memphis is beginning to have conversations within the city about galvanizing their arts/creative neighborhoods, Haynes writes:

If their intent is to create a suburban-style park of institutions that provide patrons with regularly scheduled arts and culture programming, then I’d say they’ve succeeded admirably. It’s all of the things they haven’t done by design that is causing them to fall short of their stated goal of creating what you call “day-and-night vitality.” Vitality is a product of different people using the same areas for different purposes at different times. It’s people flowing in and out of areas at their own speed, discovering new ways and reasons to engage. The Dallas Arts District is providing them with only one way and reason to engage: arrive, buy your ticket, take a seat, consume the program, and leave. It’s the opposite of what Jane Jacobs and many others would call mixed use.  

(more…)

That’s the takeaway from this Economist blog post which picks up on Blair Kamin’s takedown of the Arts District in the Chicago Tribune. The Economist goes over the problems with the Arts District that Kamin points out and then posses this zinger: “But surely it is possible to spend even more money to create an even duller arts district.” 

It turns out it is: Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island, which will cull together a team of starchitects to create branches of the Guggenheim, the Louvre, and a natural history museum. The Abu Dhabi project is also running into some PR problems: an artist boycott of the Guggenheim over the working conditions of those building the new museums. But like Dallas, the question remains: does a “if you build it, they will come,” philosophy hold water.

But setting aside this public-relations disaster, which could significantly hamper the Guggenheim’s work in filling this museum, the Saadiyat complex poses a larger question: will people come? Is it enough to build these gigantic monuments to modernity (in an otherwise not-so-modern and remote place) and assume that the razzle-dazzle will lure the tourists? Dallas’s experiment illustrates the flaws in developments that consider the needs of architecture at the expense of people. A culture district without the glue of wandering pedestrians (or an atmosphere of working artists; or let’s face it, streets) may struggle to earn its keep.

We’ve been beating around the Arts District for some time now, but here is a new take on the district from the Chicago Tribune’s Blair Kamin. This is wonderful summation of the situation:

Is it a good idea to organize arts buildings in such a clear and concentrated fashion? Or does the more mixed-up Chicago way make better sense? I ask because, despite its impressive architectural firepower, the Dallas Arts District can be an exceedingly dull place. There are no bookstores, few restaurants outside those in the museums and not a lot of street life, at least when there are no performances going on. Even some of the architects who’ve designed buildings here privately refer to the district as an architectural petting zoo — long on imported brand-name bling and short on homegrown-urban vitality.

(more…)

Over on one of my favorite new blogs, the muted, beautiful art/design-log “Paper Weight” (run by someone in Dallas named Lucia), a quote from Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha that is worth chewing on for a few days:

Art is the immense fortune of mankind. But the worst scenario is when it degenerates, which is an increasing condition. The new generations are not adequately educated; there is a need to consume without perceiving where or when this or that knowledge has come from, as if every created thing just exists. This is a compromised experience of the world. If you can trace a creation to its roots you can imagine. You can predict or prevent; but when you just don’t know the past or how to perceive the present, it’s hopeless. It’s the absence of connections: a person in a plane in the beginning of the twentieth century was aware of being flown, and of the mechanical effort necessary to put the thing up in the air. In a way, people are losing the ability to be in awe, and thus the ability to wonder how things might be improved. This is an artistic loss, when you fail to understand that the ability to be creative is a human necessity.

Yesterday, the Woodall Rodgers Park Foundation announced a handful of new donations to their capital campaign totalling, oh, $9 million, which brings the fundraising effort within $17 million of completing its goal. So my question: does that remaining $17 million include funds required to install the art planned for the park — you know, the bit that will make it attractive like Chicago’s Millenium Park (Woodall’s oft-cited model)? Or does the money needed for the art have to be raised in addition to that remaining $17 million? Here’s what a park spokesperson I asked said:

The art piece is separate from the $17 million goal. It will happen, and they are putting a process together to review how to select the art. It could happen between now and 2012, it might happen after the park is open. It’s sort of dependent on a donor being passionate about naming the iconic art feature.

Fair enough (though I hope the artist, not the donor gets to name the piece). So after the $17 million is raised, there will need to be additional funds raised to fund the art, which is unfortunate, and not because we all love us some art in parks. Rather, it is because it means the Woodall Rodgers Park’s overall design philosophy is quite different than Millenium Park’s. As someone who was close to the Millenium Park planning and development once told me, Chicago’s park was initially designed with the art installations in mind, and it was the art — the now legendary Plensa and Kapoor installations (the fountain and the bean) — that drove the formation of the rest of the park. The park was imagined “art-first” because the art created a context for the park’s funtionality, it was the spatial engine. Woodall is taking a much more conventional approach — the art is an “add-on,” a “feature.” It is something you “do” in the park not the thing that “is” the park. The Woodall Rodgers Park is still a very promising project, and the comparison with Millenium is not entierly fair. Millenium is a completely exceptional park. It is, in many ways, the park of the 21st century city. Woodall may still be a very good park, but we should start to hold our city boosters to a standard of exceptionality. And in that sense, this is a lost opportunity.

Park designed by the Office of James Burnett, rendering by Michael McCann.

The Arkansas Times notes that the Trinity Trust’s Gail Thomas will be speaking at Little Rock’s Clinton school about the Santiago Calatrava bridge-sculpture project. It seems our neighbors to the east are considering replacing one of their existing bridges, and may take a similar approach to sprucing up the skyline while fostering community development in the process.

For more than a decade, the Dallas Architecture Forum has been one of the best running lecture circuits in the region. Just glance at the luminaries who have spoken at DAF events:

Among the over 130 speakers who have addressed the Forum are Shigeru Ban; AIA Gold Medal Winner Peter Bohlin;  Jamie Carpenter; Brad Cloepfil; Winspear designer Spencer de Grey;  Elizabeth Diller+ Richard Scofidio; Peter Eisenman;  Chicago’s Aqua Tower designer Jeanne Gang;  Gordon Gill, whose firm designed the world’s tallest building, the Burj Kalifa;  Michael Graves;  Pritzker Prize winners Kazuyo Sejima, Rafael Moneo, Thom Mayne (designer of Dallas’  Museum of Nature and Science), Rem Koolhaas and Norman Foster (the later two in collaboration with the ATT Performing Arts Center);   Daniel Libeskind;  Thomas Phifer;  Rafael Vinoly;  and  Texas architects David Lake and Ted Flato.  

The Dallas Architecture Forum was recognized by the Amierican Institute of Architects as a recipient of its 2011 Institute Honors for Collaborative Achievement Award. Other honorees included : landscape architect and Rome-Prize recipient Peter Schaudt; UC Berkeley Professor Walter Hood; Copenhagen’s Louis Poulsen Lighting, Inc.; and New York City’s Active Design Guidelines.

Here’s a full release:

(more…)

The Dallas Planning Commission voted resoundly in favor of a redevelopment plan for the West Dallas neighborhood, the product of a year of work by the Dallas CityDesign Studio that focuses on trying to balance new development and existing neighborhoods in an area that is about to welcome the landing of the Calatrava Sculpture-Bridge. Via Jerome Weeks’ report on Art & Seek: 

The plan hopes to make “incremental” and “organic” the massive changes that may well hit the low-income neighborhoods north of I-30 and west of the Trinity River — now that the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge will be coming for a long visit. One of the prime goals of the plan is to “preserve, conserve, enhance” La Bajada, the mostly Hispanic community of older, single-family homes that exists north of Singleton and east of Sylvan. . . .

Instead of completely changing the nature of La Bajada and Los Altos, the CityDesign Studio’s plan hopes to re-direct the construction of high-density, residential and retail towers to the south, along the Trinity. It also seeks to develop new north-south corridors — turning Herbert Street, in particular, into a ‘High Street’ from Singleton to West Commerce that will help focus traffic, mass transit and commercial interests. It also includes specifications for street design, facade details, public parks and mixed-use areas that could feature artists’ work spaces.

 You can view the CityDesign Studio’s plan here.