My unit in Victory. When should we mention that every unit in the W tower is owned by men?
Ok. I have had an empty link at the side of this page for about a year now with the promise of analyzing (at the time) why Victory would fail. Failing is such a harsh word, but it has in many ways thus far, particularly when compared to the promise and hype. Ultimately, given the amount of investment it will get rolled back into the city fabric it tried to avoid like a little kid squirming away from something icky to prevent catching cooties from...what? Authenticity?
Well, we still haven't created that part yet either. Hopefully, it will begin spreading from very true urbanism, embodied by State Thomas. A place I have long called the best piece of reinvigorated authentic urbanity. We'll come back to this neighborhood when the author of the article does.
Thanks to Lindsey who forwarded me this article from D Magazine:
The Failure of Victory Park.
God forbid I dare critique ANY new development because ALL development is good development. I guess this City has fallen so far that we ARE desperate for something, anything. Even if deep in our bones we know the flaws embedded in the work, usually stemming from compromises made with engineers or 80's style developers set in their ways.
That wasn't the case with Victory, however. From the outset of design, mistakes were made. First of all, the designer of American Airlines Arena, and Fort Worth hero David Schwarz sited the venue oddly. "Let's cant it. Ya know, to be different." Forcing every block around it to accommodate oddly configured shapes and patterns forming a mish mash of grids, former grids, and irregularities.
Ok. I have had an empty link at the side of this page for about a year now with the promise of analyzing (at the time) why Victory would fail. Failing is such a harsh word, but it has in many ways thus far, particularly when compared to the promise and hype. Ultimately, given the amount of investment it will get rolled back into the city fabric it tried to avoid like a little kid squirming away from something icky to prevent catching cooties from...what? Authenticity?
Well, we still haven't created that part yet either. Hopefully, it will begin spreading from very true urbanism, embodied by State Thomas. A place I have long called the best piece of reinvigorated authentic urbanity. We'll come back to this neighborhood when the author of the article does.
Thanks to Lindsey who forwarded me this article from D Magazine:
The Failure of Victory Park.
"It is sleek, chic, and modernist. Translated,The writer Wick Allison hits on all the points I've caught hell for in places like on Dallas Metropolypse, suggesting the architecture belongs in somewhere in the antiseptic third act of the 2001: A Space Odyssey. When the W was still a 2-dimensional imagination, I had this to say:
that means it is cold, barren, and unfriendly."
"looks like Kubrick's vision of a dystopic future."Clearly, I need new movies to reference. Next time I discuss Millennials, I will reference Juno. I promise.
God forbid I dare critique ANY new development because ALL development is good development. I guess this City has fallen so far that we ARE desperate for something, anything. Even if deep in our bones we know the flaws embedded in the work, usually stemming from compromises made with engineers or 80's style developers set in their ways.
That wasn't the case with Victory, however. From the outset of design, mistakes were made. First of all, the designer of American Airlines Arena, and Fort Worth hero David Schwarz sited the venue oddly. "Let's cant it. Ya know, to be different." Forcing every block around it to accommodate oddly configured shapes and patterns forming a mish mash of grids, former grids, and irregularities.
Next, most importantly and by design, the City was excluded. Presumably, a developer led decision, they chose NOT to be a part of the City, by re-routing roads and proposed DART alignments to avoid Victory as much as possible. Lesson: You can't be exclusive in the 21st century city, isolating yourself as a development prevents it from ever becoming a neighborhood, which all known and successful places are at their root. You might as well cut off your own hand and plant it in the ground hoping for it to sprout a body. Now take a look at State Thomas. Say what you will about what happened to the historic neighborhood, but the destruction was from Office speculation in the 80's that ripped apart the largely African-American neighborhood that was there. The current development was about curing the destruction.
"To see Jacob's ideas at work in Dallas, go to the corner of Allen and State in Uptown, and walk down either street. You will see buildings constructed on a human scale, out of natural materials, with narrow side streets."It's not coincidental that the writer picked the same intersection that I often describe as the best part of the City. Re-investment brought about by the first TIF in Texas saved this portion of Dallas when there WAS no "uptown". It created uptown. Now that it has been colonized by yuppies is time to create more supply of urbanism.
Back to Victory. There are other flaws, but ultimately they all come back to that decision to disconnect although it is hard to blame them. There was very little TO connect to nearby. The transportation network was/IS a disaster, LoMac in particular. So they had to create a neighborhood all to themself and frankly that is typical of Dallas area development.
The roads are SO bad (meaning hostile and inhumane) that you have to play defense. You have to create a destination so great to literally pull people into your site off those bad streets. In a future post I have outlined, I will write about how "We Will Never have a Fifth Ave., Champs Elysees, or Michigan Ave." With that said, transportation always comes first and building and development are a reaction. If you don't get it right, you fail.
To create their destination they relied strictly on what was inside the walls, events at AAC, Ghost Bar, the now defunct n9ne, not the space between the walls, which is what people remember, where the return to, and what really creates "place." It is (near?) impossible to create a lasting and true place this way. At the very least, Victory teaches us lessons.
So what else went wrong? Let's count the ways shall we...
1. Road Alignment - Have you noticed that the most prominent open space, AT&T Plaza terminates
2. Block Size - The blocks are too narrow to create efficient buildings. Don't get me wrong efficiency should never be the mark by which anything is judged, but it's probably still wise to be cost effective. The buildings are about 140-145' wide. A garage is 120' minimum width, leaving barely, and I mean BARELY enough to get some liner use there. This is particularly important if they are going to be completely crazy and try to park each building individually in an area with thousands of empty parking spaces. So it means that everybody has to be pulled way up on top of the garages and away from the streetscapes.
3. Phasing - They built everything on one side of the street. Retail more than any other use needs more of itself nearby. Mall designers and retailers have very specific dimensions to make retail cross shop and create spin-off business, aka synergy. It's the one good things malls have done for us beyond nostalgia for Gen-Xers. Not unexpectedly, the retail tenants move out and/or close down one by one.
The built form created by the W and its in-line brethren act more like a curtain of urbanity, a facade of "cool". Don't pay attention to the man behind the curtain however. In fact, this seems a lot like Dallas' reputation anyway. So it DOES work in a Koolhaasian nihilistic sort of way. If this was meant, it would be a genius work of art. I'm guessing this was actually a happy little accident.
4. Retail Programming/Branding - Too much testosterone. Even the developers admit it. And yes, all men bought in the W.
5. Lifeless Architecture - Stale, antiseptic, lifeless. You choose the descriptor. The D Mag article covers this.
6. Streetscape - Doesn't soften the hard edges of the buildings enough. I'm willing to reserve judgment until the rest is built here.
7. Park - Here I'm referring to the little dog-shitting venue in front of the House by Stark and Yoo. Now I have talked up the virtues of dogshit on this blog previously. No, seriously. This doesn't feel like a public park. There is a wall and grade change disconnecting it from the street. And no street in front of the buildings it serves makes it feel like theirs...which, in fact, it is. That's the point. Ours, not yours. Stay away from our happy little retail development you tens of thousands of daily visitors to AAC.
Someday when I get more time perhaps I can put together some sketches of the areas around Victory in attempt to pull it off its island.
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9 comments:
All the problems you mention are spot-on. The whole VP area has always felt disjointed, like a mix of parts that weren't put together correctly.
That said, compared to the former brownfield site/heavy industrial plant that was there, its a shining gem for our city.
So, aside from nuking the place and starting over, what's some ideas on making things better?
Uptown is what we should be striving for?? (shudder)
It think it is the "garden apartments for the 00's".
The pedestrian experience is the walk from the front door to the Valet stand.
I didn't say Uptown. I said State Thomas. And I'm not so concerned with quality of the architecture as I am quality of the place. Given the dearth of "place" in the city, I think the market is bearing that out in terms of market value for those units, townhomes, and blocks. Some of the post and gables properties are erected pieces of shit, but they are pieces of shit that people are paying good money to live in.
This has little to do with building materials or quality of architecture. In fact, they even work despite being corridor fed, wrap buildings which as you allude to, people go from unit to garage to job and never have to see the light of day.
The best thing that happened at State Thomas is that several of the buildings are parked at less than 1 space per unit, and it works! People park in the parallel spaces b/c it is more convenient than the garage (and often safer as my car was broken into in a post property garage).
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As for what to do with Victory in order to salvage it, the best that can happen is that it ties into its nearest possible fabric as the highways do their best to completely bifurcate this area, and that is the land to the East and fixing what is there.
The two probs consist of the Jefferson North End being a gated garden apt. It's not a city block, it's a compound. Buildings have to engage their streets to take ownership of them, make them pedestrian friendly, slow traffic...AND we need some actual public streets going thru this property, which is the key. We need to tie Victory to LoMac thru the Jefferson property. Fortunately, the current owners of the Jefferson are aware of this necessity.
The second problem is the nasty snarl of spaghetti streets, free right turns, narrow sidewalks, etc. that is comprised of Field, Pearl, Harry Hines, McKinnon, Akard, etc.
There are more names than actual streets b/c they are constantly merging and looping...it's chaos. And I'm often the only pedestrian there besides the constant road crews up there closing lanes.
You can't have a city in this area if the primary function of these streets is to get people the hell out of there as fast as possible and that is the underlying endemic pathology guiding Dallas in the wrong direction.
Why are we building roads to get people in and out? That's another example of subsidizing/building for the suburbanites. These streets have to be tamed in order to create people places. Once we get over the mental blockage we can save the investment and development at both LoMac and Victory.
Ironically, Harry Hines already does a pretty good job of scaling down from highway transitioning to city street. By the time it gets to Moody we can begin narrowing the streets. Instead we do the opposite and ramp right back up to highway scaled, dimensioned, and radiused streets.
If the place is good (or great enough) people will find a way to get there. Is it easy to park in NYC? Is it easy to drive into Paris?
If Dallas wants to live up to its own expectations we need to dump the car first mentality of the majority of its streets and use more car friendly streets as connectors between these areas.
I'd argue the quality of the sense of "place" in Uptown is as in-authentic as Victory. The architecture is a big reason why. The popularity of the area has more to do with "trendi-ness" as "placy-ness". Your average striped-shirted douche bag isn't a big connoisseur of place.
Just my opinion, but Disneyland is Disneyland, whether it has narrow tree-lined "mews" streets, or if it has slick modern architecture.
West Village is disney land, absolutely. pretending to be something it is not. State Thomas really has no pretensions. The people inside might, but in a way that is a good thing. The same thing happened to SoHo, meatpacking district, Park Slope, Hoboken, etc.
It's almost the top of the food chain of urban places for yuppies and douchosity to colonize a place...actually, i shouldn't use colonize...it's more like they move in and hand out blankets carrying smallpox or more likely, the clap.
other people build areas up, the n the spendthrift, pretentious types then overpay for the right to be there. That overpayment signalizes the gap between quality of place over quality of individual unit or building.
A premium on place so to speak.
Eventually those types will find a new place to suffocate, but State Thomas will remain a good, well-balanced neighborhood. the buildings will come and go and be replaced, but the fabric will remain. This is largely defined by the underlying DNA in the regulating document of the place and realized b/c of the location and proximity to downtown and McKinney ave.
"regulating document of the place."
Stop, your making it worse! This sounds like form based zoning, which sounds like Architectural Communism, which is sad, really. Not a fan of putting architecture in a box.
So, if that was the goal of State Thomas... Then, Success!!!
i agree with you on a theoretical basis. but in reality, what good has been built in the last fifty years? very little. regulating documents, design guidelines, and form-based coding are necessary evils as long as architects design and developers build shit like well any of the JPI projects littering areas immediately surrounding downtown.
Architects can get free reign when they earn it and stop trying to be zaha hadid.
those regulating documents are representative of the public, thru elected officials acting in the public's interest, in defending their cities from the onslaught of crap that occurred from 1950 to 2000.
personally, i'm more for defined patterns than i am for "regulation"...goals to live up to rather than limits. that's what good guidelines do. bad ones get overly restrictive.
however, b/c technology has come so far, literally anything is possible and architects, builders, engineers, and the like all need to watch Jurassic Park (Oh! another movie reference) and stop asking whether they CAN and start asking whether they SHOULD.
primary example, brad pitt's nonsensical and inhumane experiments on the poor in NOLA.
this isn't meant to be a debate about style. i'm style agnostic. but i do demand that buildings behave in the public's best interest. there are modern and contemporary masterpieces just like there are classical. however the modern/contemporary ones are in the minority of their style, which causes reactionaries to swing back to classical design fundamentalism see: west village.
Great Blog. Many a valued opinion that I share. I've been stuck on here for the better part of the day. I'll be a avid reader from here on out.
I live in North Dallas, cookie cutter suburb, by necessity rather than choice. Our location has a big box centre if you like that is separated from us by a 6 lane parkway on both sides.
Having lived in Italy and the UK for extended periods of time I fully grasp the concept of livability and I do think the potential exists in Big D for the city proper to achieve this. The intersection you speak of, I have stood at also and it speaks volumes. I was initially dumbstruck when I stumbled upon it. I'd like to move down there when the opportunity presents itself.
The few times I've been down VP it struck me as a Island in disconnect. It was weird. The idea of AAC as a central attraction is good when its volume of people you want in and out, when its volume you want in and lingering you need to look at a stadium neighborhood like Chelsea or Highbury in London. The people leaving need to walk through a 'high street' as the poms refer to it, to get to and from the attraction. I couldn't do that and it pissed me off to be fair. I'd like to see a change to this effect or any effect that would make a trip down there last longer.
Thanks Deaconskye,
You'll be interested to know that my next column for D Magazine (just submitted the draft about a week ago) for the April issue is on "How Victory Will Win?"
Good thoughts too. In this country we have a fundamental disconnect between traffic and placemaking. In "High Streets," there is a direct relationship. Move the most amount of people, have the highest degree of placemaking. We have the opposite, an indirect relationship because of the dominance of car travel (which by no means is a product of market forces, but instead one of policy and subsidy).
Unfortunately, the quest for moving car traffic suffocates other forms of traffic, particularly the most important for urban livelihood, pedestrian traffic.
The "High Street" of Victory is Houston St., the road on the backside. This is where all the pedestrians walk, but Victory turned its back on it. Presumably because there was no flex from city transportation for real improvements to Houston, supportive of the massive investment happening at Victory. Instead, the result - because of Houston likely being on some BS thoroughfare plan and therefore sacred - becomes a negative influence on Victory.
Saving Victory will be about eliminating all of these negative influences. Some of which are external (such as the road network and the nearby garden apartment superblock), others are internal and systemic in the branding, marketing, and hence, design. It was made to be exclusive. But urban places are populated, therefore inclusive. Too many of our recent "mixed-use live-work-play" touted projects think they can overcome bad urban design with the exterior trappings of urbanism (storefronts, street trees, parallel parking, housing above retail). Except all of those things are an outgrowth of urbanism, the reason to be there.
Our approach to urban development is sort of like Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs. All of the forcibly exfoliated skin of women you layer upon yourself doesn't make you pretty or a woman.
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