New pavilions in Dallas parks display ambitious civic architecture
09:49 AM CDT on Wednesday, April 23, 2008
BY DAVID DILLON / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News fdluxe@dallasnews.com
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcont...1.2f1aa9f.html
It's spring, and architecture is popping up all over Dallas. Not just condos in Uptown and malls on the Tollway, but stunning pavilions in public parks. Eight have been completed so far, with another dozen on tap for this year. Eventually, there will be 43, including restorations of nine historic WPA pavilions from the 1930s, making this one of the most ambitious civic architecture initiatives in the city's history."
Civic architecture" implies courthouses, libraries and other high-minded monuments that remind us of our rights and responsibilities as citizens. But the pavilions are lower-case architecture for the people, simple utilitarian structures designed for picnics, birthday parties and other celebrations of the ordinary and the everyday. They cost an average of $210,000, which works out to $9 million for the entire program, approximately one-fifteenth of what the city pumped into the American Airlines Center.
"We want to get distinguished architecture out into the neighborhoods, so that residents can feel good about themselves and their city," says Willis Winters, architect, assistant director of Dallas' Park and Recreation Department and the vision behind the program.
"Distinguished architecture" is the operative phrase here, and one that is rarely applied to park pavilions – typically cookie cutter structures, picked from a catalog and thrown up fast and cheap. Better than nothing, but not by much.
City hires some of the best architects in region
The Park Department has taken a more imaginative approach by hiring some of the best architects in the region to design its pavilions, including Frank Welch, Ron Wommack, Joe McCall and Pablo Laguarda, as well as recruits from New Orleans, New York, Oklahoma City and Oslo, Norway. This is not a lottery; the architects were required to submit drawings and scale models, and meet several times with neighborhood groups to win support for their designs.
"Willis challenged us to come up with fresh ideas, not pat solutions," says Oklahoma City architect Rand Elliott, who designed a performance shell for Opportunity Park in South Dallas. "He wanted our best work, which is not what you usually hear from city hall."
Consequently, the new pavilions are more varied, sophisticated and engaging than their tin-roof and pipe-column predecessors.
Elliott's performance shell is a piece of steel origami, red on one side, silver on the other, that has been cut and folded to create an enclosure for singers, dancers and musicians. Contoured benches and community recognition plaques will be added this summer to complete the design.
Equally spare and abstract is Edward Baum's "chaise longue" for Ridgewood Park in East Dallas, featuring a thin wood and steel roof that hovers like a minimalist cloud above benches and picnic tables.
The Mexican-American community near Columbia Avenue's Randall Park asked for a shade structure where mothers could look after their small children while their sons and husbands played softball and soccer nearby. So Winters created a canopy of thin metal slats that flutters above a grassy play space like a gigantic tent, filtering the light while casting dramatic shadows on the ground.
Several pavilions are intentionally whimsical, such as Laguarda's tangle of leaves and branches in Hattie Rankin Moore Park, and McCall's "leaning towers" at Brownwood Park, each struggling to stay upright in a metaphoric wind. A few are more straightforwardly contextual, like BRW's twin-peaked pavilion at Lindsley Park, which borrows its pitched roof and decorative brick columns from the English Tudor cottages in the adjacent neighborhood.
Enthusiastic communities
Community reaction to these pavilions has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. There has been virtually no vandalism, a sure sign of public acceptance. When residents feel that they've had a say in a design, that it hasn't been imposed on them, they usually embrace it and look after it, like a gift from a good friend.
Though only half finished, the project is being watched closely by other cities that, like Dallas, have thought of pavilions, bus shelters and other humble structures as maintenance problems instead of design opportunities. Imagine the improvement in the Dallas streetscape if DART had hired a few good architects to design its bus shelters instead of buying them in bulk, like salt and sand, and spreading them around the city. A bad design replicated hundreds of times becomes publicly subsidized blight.
But the pavilion program may pay off in other ways down the road. Dallas' best architects often refuse to work for the city because of low fees and heavy bureaucratic meddling. The fees are still miserly, but by improving the program and the selection process, the city hopes to create a pool of local talent that it can draw on later for larger civic commissions. This is not an argument for parochialism, but a recognition that to create a robust architectural culture, or a robust local economy, you can't import everything; sooner or later, you have to grow your own. And it can work. Alvar Aalto's first commission was a bus shelter in Helsinki, and look what that led to.
Making cities livable
Ultimately, great cities pay attention to the little things as well as monuments: trees, parks, sidewalks, views, what urbanist William Whyte memorably called "tremendous trifles." Individually, they may not amount to much, but collectively they have an enormous impact because they help make cities livable and memorable.
What sticks in our minds about, say, Seattle and San Francisco, is not great architecture, of which there is surprisingly little, but the quality of the places themselves, the richness of their public life. Just being there is pleasure enough. Barcelona, now an economic powerhouse, is a bouillabaisse of small sensory pleasures that includes everything from neighborhood plazas to fountains, street lamps and manhole covers.
In its own modest way, the Dallas Pavilion Project is making a similar statement: that the small and fragile parts of the city are as important as the arenas and skyscrapers.
PHOTOS
This is a really cool quality of life thing that should get more press. Kudos to David Dillon on the article.
I think it would be really cool if Dallas were able to mimic the Serpentine Gallery in London and have a temporary structure each summer designed by a famous (or perhaps local) architect. Maybe put it on the Woodall Rodgers park once it is completed? That would be a big draw to the area, I think.
http://www.serpentinegallery.org/architecture/
I think the State Fair would be the perfect opportunity for this kind of thing. The Exposition used to demonstrate new technologies and all kinds of new experiences besides just lots of food rides and cars. With the Esplanade planning on light and water shows it would be great to incorporate some kind of technology pavilion into one of the parts of the park thats planning on new green areas like the area near the Hall of Religion and Music Hall. Part of the Exposition would include new architecture and every year there could be a new temporary pavilion built like your suggesting grantboston.
Such new architecture has a hard time finding a place in Historic Fair Park but temporary is perfect considering most of the Texas Exposition was built for only temporary exhibition use. I think they could carve out a tech section that would be really attractive to fair goers. So many people even the Fair operators only see the State Fair as a country like affair cause it fits well with parts of their captive audience but some many people I know only go once every three or four years and there is plenty of captive audience in Dallas for this great architecture to exhibit it during the Fair and all around Dallas many parks.
Wow, I'm really glad this is actually happening. I saw several of the designs some time ago, but doubted ANY would come to fruition. All were quite interesting. Would be cool to see how they are turning out. These were covered in an article in the May/June 2006 issue of Texas Architect magazine. Nice article and several renderings, in case anyone has a copy laying around, or can access it at texasarchitect.org.
Last edited by sterling; 28 April 2008 at 01:33 AM.
I think it would be cool to open this up to Architecture students from UTA --- do a competition once each year it gets built and displayed at the state fair then moved to a city park as it's permanent location.
In fact like the article suggested... How cool would it be to design cool buss stations radiating out from downtown on each major rout up to say one mile or so.
Something like this would be nice.
http://people.artcenter.edu/~jsong5/thesis/index.html
Here's a guide to the historic, current and future pavilions for Dallas City Parks:
ftp://ftp.dallascityhall.com/Pavilio...n%20Dallas.pdf
Slowly (Very Slowly, Occasionally) But Surely, City's Custom Park Pavilions Take Shape
By Robert Wilonsky, Sun., Nov. 14 2010 @ 10:17AM
Categories: Park and Rec
http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfa...its_c.php#more
What you see above are the new pavilions at Brownwood Park on Walnut Hill Lane, between Webb Chapel Road and Marsh Lane. When I spotted them Friday morning, contractors were putting the finishing touches on the three structures, which have been very slow to take shape. "We had difficulty with the contractor," says Willis Winters, assistant director of Park and Recreation. "But we're back on track." Says Winters, "they were not being fabricated and installed according to our specifications." So the city made the workers redo them.
Designed by Joe McCall, a principal at Oglesby Green, they're part of the city's decade-old custom pavilion program, funded with 2003 and '06 bond package money. Some 25 parks citywide are supposed to have their own one-of-a-kind signature shelters, each designed by a different architect -- some from as far away as New York, most of them locals.
Says Winters, they've been rolling out across the city in recent years, though District 13, among others, has been slow to get its pavilions. The Brownwood trio are the first in Northwest Dallas, with more forthcoming at Webb Chapel Park on Cromwell (designed by Quimby McCoy Preservation Architects) and Royal Park (courtesy of HOK).
The program officially commenced with the 2003 bond program after a trial run in the late 1990s proved successful -- at least, as far as Winters, a fellow of the American Institute of Architects, was concerned. "It got me thinking that rather than selecting pavilions out to the catalog, which is standard practice for park systems across America, we started thinking about doing custom pavilions that would place great architecture in neighborhoods throughout Dallas."
There are, at present, about 20 spread across the city, with more about to begin construction in coming months. Several others are in being put out to bid; even more are being designed.
"Some are pretty cool," says Winters. "Some are more successful than others, but it gets great architecture into the neighborhoods. Some have been moved around or were canceled before they got to design, but overall the program's moved forward." Tomorrow afternoon, Winters is giving Unfair Park a peek at all of the pavilion models, which he keeps in his city hall office. Slide show? Yes, please.
Barefoot in the Park Pavilion, or: How the City's Putting Art Into Neighborhoods
By Robert Wilonsky, Thu., Nov. 18 2010 @ 3:33PM
Categories: Park and Rec
http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfa...k_pavilion.php
The St. Augustine Park Pavilion, built in 2008
On Sunday we took a look at the new pavilions at Brownwood Park on Walnut Hill Lane, just as they were getting their finishing touches following some issues with a contractor that tried to cut corners. At which point Willis Winters, assistant director of Park and Rec, told us the tin tipis were but the latest installments in the city's ongoing Park Pavilion Program, which has received little attention -- because, well, the city's done little to promote it.
Earlier this week, though, Winters invited Unfair Park to City Hall to browse the models and conceptual renderings currently encased in Plexiglas in Park and Rec's sixth-floor offices. He's quite proud of the nearly two dozen pavilions planted in the last couple of years -- rightly so, since one (the Laguarda.Low-designed St. Augustine Park Pavilion seen above), took home Best in Show honors at last year's American Institute of Architects Dallas Design Awards -- besting Cowboys Stadium, matter of fact. And Winters himself is responsible for two, including the Randall Park Pavilion across the street from Woodrow Wilson High School.
On the other side is a brief Q&A with Winters. But more important, you will find a briefing given to the park board only last month -- the first ever about the program, which launched, quietly, with the 1999 redo of the Lindsley Park Pavilion at the request of neighbors. Winters was also kind enough to provide us with an alphabetically ordered list of all the pavilions -- along with their price tags and architects, from recognizable locals to hot-shot national designers who wanted to be part of the program.
(One thing Winters especially likes about the program is that it pairs outsiders with natives. For instance, the Webb Chapel Park pavilion, which the park board voted on today, is a partnership with New York's Wendy Evans Joseph, who did the Women's Museum in Fair Park, and our own Quimby McCoy.)
Says Winters, "We're trying to bring quality architecture into all the neighborhoods of Dallas. It instills pride in the parks." These, he insists, are as important to the area as the Big Projects -- the venues at the AT&T Performing Arts Center, say, or Cowboys Stadium. "When architects come here to see the Arts District or whatever, we can add this to the list of attractions," says Winters.
Much more on the other side. Pretty pictures too!
...
http://www.scribd.com/doc/43192551/P...atibility-Mode
Three of the city’s new park pavilions to receive design awards — including one all the way from New York state
By Robert Wilonsky
rwilonsky@dallasnews.com
9:50 am on July 24, 2012
http://cityhallblog.dallasnews.com/2...rk-state.html/
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