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A few weeks ago, the Architectural League of New York announced the winners of the Emerging Voices Award, the most prestigious award for young architects in the Americas and a reliable predictor and career booster for the profession’s most intellectually ambitious practitioners. The fact that there are no Dallas architects on the list of winners is not surprising. The last (and only) time a Dallas architect won the award was in 1994, 30 years ago. (The winner was Gary “Corky” Cunningham, and he lived up to his name.)
If your instinct is to shrug off the results of an admittedly unremarkable professional award, then I suggest you reconsider. The city’s inability to produce even the occasional winner in this competition is indicative of a broader civic failure to foster and support a culture of creative architecture. One look at endless general development—one gray condominium complex after another—is to understand this reality.
Dallas is awash with corporate architecture firms, many doing exemplary work, but few independent practitioners are pushing the city to think creatively about issues that go far beyond aesthetics, about equity, resiliency, walkability and integrity Quality of life and other issues.
There are many explanations for this state of affairs—a conservative culture that promotes conformity is a good place to start—but a significant factor is that within the city limits, Dallas does not have a university architecture school capable of attracting top faculty.Consider that equivalent cities such as Boston, Chicago, Houston, New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles have many kinds of The School of Architecture generates creative design and discussion within its boundaries.
One possible solution would be for Southern Methodist University to establish a stand-alone program on campus or downtown. This will complement the school’s Lyell School of Engineering. Through Hunter College, the school already houses the core of the James Platt Collection’s outstanding architectural library, which includes the books, manuscripts, papers, and other documents of the noted Dallas architect and planner. A new project would be an expensive one, but SMU has a strong local alumni network, including many in the real estate industry, who would likely support such a project (and hopefully put their name in it).
A simpler, but not simple, potential solution would be for the University of Texas at Arlington to move its School of Architecture, Planning and Public Affairs (North Texas’ only architecture school) to downtown Dallas.
That would present its own challenges, not least potential opposition from other schools in the UT system, notably the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Texas at Dallas, which may view the move as a threat to their interests. But this is a political problem that can be overcome, and there is precedent for establishing university graduate programs at satellite campuses in Dallas; for example, Texas A&M University School of Dentistry is located there. Architecture schools themselves occasionally offer studios and other programs in Dallas.
There are other obstacles, including the fact that the school’s staff and students call Arlington home. But the student population moves regularly, and many faculty members already live in Dallas, as I did when I taught at the school for nine years.
For UTA and its School of Architecture, the benefits of this transition will be considerable. Moving from Arlington, a city without public transportation, would be a significant advantage for students, especially if the Dallas location could be developed with or adjacent to affordable housing.
The plan to move the building would also have the side benefit of freeing up a building at the heart of the school’s Arlington campus, which has struggled to keep up with demand for classrooms, housing and administrative space as the student population soared to more than 40,000 students.
Instead, Dallas has a severe glut of office space, even as a large number of new buildings are being built downtown. It will be a great job for the School of Architecture to transform this space into a new home. Alternatively, the project could be moved to a purpose-built structure as part of the upcoming regeneration of the area, including the Kay Bailey Hutchison Conference Centre.
More importantly, the move would provide the city with an institution to attract and support a class of architects that transcended the boundaries of corporate architecture; relying on university appointments to fund more experimental, independently working practitioners. The school could maintain a footprint in Arlington and devote space there to issues critical to regional development, particularly the study of suburban planning.
Whatever the solution, Dallas is long overdue for an infusion of architectural talent and the culture that talent creates. Where the organization and its employees are located matters. Where these workers live shapes their worldview and behavior, and these people shape the places they live. For Dallas to significantly change the quality of its built environment—if it wants to become more livable, equitable, and economically stable, not to mention less boring—it needs to have the institutions that shape that environment on a city-wide scale.
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