Archinect - News

Architecture critic Mark Lamster proposes a new pedestrian memorial park for Dallas

2020-01-29T13:16:00-05:00

In a recent column for The Dallas Morning News, architecture critic Mark Lamster proposes a new pedestrian-oriented vision for the district surrounding Dealey Plaza, where President John F. Kennedy was murdered, and where the Dallas authorities are currently planning a new municipal memorial for the victims of racial violence. The memorial will be set in Martyrs Park, a grassy, triangular knoll surrounded on all sides by highway infrastructure and roads.

"Make no mistake: The geography of Dallas is a geography of race," Lamster writes, highlighting that historically speaking, "systematic discrimination forced African Americans into the least desirable spaces of the city—areas prone to flooding, near industry, caught on the wrong side of train tracks and highways, and always ripe for appropriation if and when the need arose" and that the same logic is currently at play with regards to the location of the proposed Martyrs Park memorial.

Satellite view of Dealey Plaza and Martyrs Park ...

Before "The Tulip," there was Welton Becket's Reunion Tower

2019-07-17T09:14:00-04:00

With a certain bulb-shaped observation tower in the news again, perhaps now is a good time to revisit another seminal observation tower project: The Welton Becket and Associates-designed Reunion Tower in Dallas, Texas.

Crafted as a three-story, lightbulb-studded geodesic dome hoisted atop a series of monolithic poured-in-place concrete piers, Reunion Tower is among one of the more iconic elements of Dallas’s eclectic and neon-lit skyline. The tower rises to 561-feet in height and is topped in part by a panoramic restaurant designed to revolve around the building’s axis once every 55 minutes, creating one of the more remarkable—and still fully functional—high points of 1970s-era architecture. The restaurant, Five Sixty by Wolfgang Puck, according to its website, offers diners “floor-to-ceiling windows offering 360-degree views of the city from the dramatic, revolving dining room.”

View of the Reunion Tower. Image courtesy of Wikimedia user texas_mustang.

Like a New Year’s Eve ball th...

Meet Tanya Ragan, the female real estate developer taking Dallas by storm

2019-07-15T16:50:00-04:00

Her newly resurrected 114-year-old Purse Building features a floor-to ceiling mural of the late Jacobs, an urbanist activist and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, superimposed on a downtown street grid. Above Jacobs’ striking bespectacled image, her mantra “New ideas need old buildings” blazes in neon lights.

The Dallas Morning News profiles Tanya Ragan, a Dallas-based real estate developer who is taking on commercial real estate's "boys club" mentality with a Jane Jacobs-inspired approach.

Ragan's Wildcat Management is behind a series of new and forthcoming projects, including the redevelopment of the Liberty State Bank Building, the Purse Building, and others, that aim to repurpose historic buildings in the city's downtown.

Ragan was recently listed among other influential developers by The Business Journals network.

Regarding the difficulty of developing real estate projects as woman in Texas, Kourtny Garrett, CEO of Downtown Dallas Inc., a non-profit development advocate in the city, told The Dallas Morning News, “It’s an uphill climb and you have to be smart and you have to be patient—Tanya would laugh if she heard me call her patient because she knows she’s sometimes not—but in terms of understanding how market cycles go, you have to be willing to hit the pavement every single da...

Results of the Dallas Connected City Design Challenge

2014-03-10T19:37:00-04:00

A city that is connected -- in all senses of the word -- is a good city. The finalists of the Dallas Connected City Design Challenge offered numerous solutions in how Downtown Dallas can be linked to the Trinity River. To guarantee a variety of ideas for Dallas' future development, the competition invited submissions in a Professional Stream and an Open Stream. Three Professional and 4 Open entries won.

Professional Stream finalists (selected by jury):

Stoss + SHoP, Boston, MA: "HyperDensity/HyperLandscape"

Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura, Barcelona, Spain: Dallas: "Downtown & Trinity"

OMA*AMO, New York, NY: "2Rivers/2Datums"

Open Stream finalists (selected by jury and public voting):

Kohki Hiranuma of Kohki Hiranuma Architect & Associates, Osaka, Japan: "Forest"

Bogdan Chipara of Constanta, Romania: Bridging

Raik Thonig and Marius Kreft of University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas: "Baroque Forest"

McLain Clutter of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan: "Incentive Network"

For more details, head over to Bustler.