The Design Future Dallas blog is an open platform for creative people to express their opinions about the state of Dallas, Design, Ideas, and anything else. We support everyone and their passionate views about making our city a better place.
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On March 24, Design Future Dallas hosted the Awards Reception at Common Desk in Deep Ellum. All the submissions were up on display, and the audience voted on the crowd favorite.
Winners were selected anonymously by a jury of Dallas design leaders. Take a look at the competition page for images from the winning teams.
The reception photos were provided by Brad Taylor of www.caprockstudio.com
We tout the Arts District as the largest collection of buildings by Pritzker Prize winning architects. In tours and marketing materials, docents and building owners are eager to communicate that a famous architect has designed their building. But are the most prominent and highest profile architects always the better choice?
The average person already has too much on their mind. Between work, socializing, and family, people don’t care about the musings of the urban obsessed. To get people interested in good city design, we have to connect their work life, social life, and family life with positive experiences in the chaos of an urban environment.
A glance at the City of Dallas GIS zoning overlays clearly illustrates the pathwork of interlocking and overlapping areas. Despite all these regulations with the supposed goal of creating a functional, cohesive city, Dallas is left in a situation not unlike Houston. A city with no zoning regulations, comprised of disconnected patchworks held together by the loosest of connections.
As a landscape architect, I look to even broader spatial context to determine the best use or the best design for a specific site. What are the regional transportation connections that could be enhanced by building at the site, or how does this park fit into a larger system of parks and open spaces in the city?
Every May, new graduates in creative industries are looking for jobs, and are willing to move almost anywhere for the potential of doing good work in a growing creative community. So, why would the most talented, ambitious, and entrepreneurial graduates move to Dallas, when the firms in Los Angeles, and Zurich are designing all of our buildings and urban spaces?
As urban designers, is it within our purview to design streets for this extreme? There’s a simple creed to design streets for people and as places themselves, but how do we do it in city that overwhelmingly overlooks its street maintenance, pothole repair, and continues to debate decades-old infrastructure projects that are distinctly anti-urban?
For nearly 40 years SWA has conducted a summer program to train focused groups of students in landscape architecture, planning and urban design. Each summer, our students spend four weeks in studio focusing on a collective design problem enhanced with speakers and weekly critiques featuring distinguished design professionals, public officials, local stakeholders and residents. For the first time in over a decade, Dallas will serve as the laboratory within which the students will explore, experiment, and invent. The timing could not be more appropriate as Dallas sits at the precipice of a number of decisions tremendously influencing the structure and vibrancy of the city we and the next generation will call home.
There have been many versions of the Trinity Parkway throughout the years. It can be difficult to keep up with the constantly changing and growing list of alternatives and plans. At one of the recent Trinity Parkway public input forums, we the attendees were introduced to the Dream Team plan. See the pdf here.
