Dallas
City Hall
1500 Marilla Street
Dallas
Texas 75201
USA
I.M. Pei and Partners
1977
The idea of a
new city hall for Dallas emerged in the mid 1960s, as part of a program of
"Goals for Dallas" designed to restore the city's reputation after the
assassination of President Kennedy. As Pei recalls,
"When you do
a city hall, it has to convey an image of the people, and this had to
represent the people of Dallas... The people I met - rich and poor,
powerful and not so powerful - were all very proud of their city. The felt
that Dallas was the greatest city there was, and I could not disappoint
them."
Pei's design
involves a dramatic cantilevered facade, facing north towards the newly
growing office towers of Dallas, "to create a dialogue with the downtown, a
public-private dialogue with the commercial high rises." To effect this
dialogue meant extending the site to transform seven acres of rundown
buildings into a new plaza for the building to look out onto, together with
a newly built "buffer zone."
The basis for
the facade is partly sculptural, allowing the relatively low-rise building
to "assert" its presence with respect to the cluster of high-rise office
towers. Pei also hoped that by creating the bulk of the office space for
officials in the upper stories, citizens could visit the lower stories
without having to navigate through an off-putting number of offices and
people - an interesting opposite to Foster's more recent approach to
London's City Hall and
Berlin's Reichstag, which
both involve bringing the people up above their representatives.
In practice,
the result is a set of generous and attractive public spaces on the lower
floors, with excellent downtown views, which are if anything too empty. They
feel as if they would be better filled by theater-goers milling in the
interval than by lone individuals wandering in to pay their parking fines.
Simon Glynn
2004
How to visit
The City Hall
is on the south edge of downtown, just north of the I-30. Depending on your
driving direction, take Griffin St, Akard or Ervay exits. City Hall is best
approached from Young St, which runs along the north edge of its plaza.
Click for more
detailed
directions from the City Hall web site.
Dallas City
Hall is open to the public. Its web site is at
www.dallascityhall.com, but is particularly uninformative about
visiting.
Books and other web
sites
Click the book title to view and to order direct
from