5th Annual White Rock Home Tour

The area’s only all-modern home tour embarks on its fifth year of benefiting Blue Ribbon School Hexter Elementary with a wonderful display of mid-century modern homes and a sustainable home.
Architecture enthusiasts won’t want to miss the meet-and-greets with the architects and landscapers at the homes they designed.

To celebrate the tour’s five-year milestone, Advocate Magazine White Rock Home Tour presented by Micky Carr and Janelle Alcantara, David Griffin and Company Realtors, is staking claim to another first this year: it is curating a first-ever exhibition of Ju-Nel Homes artifacts and memorabilia to be displayed in April. It is also presenting a Ju-Nel Homes speaker's forum on April 23. Both events are hosted and co-presented by Dallas Center for Architecture.
Save $5. Buy in Advance.
Buy a home tour ticket at White Rock Coffee, Green Spot or neighboring Tom Thumb locations by April 25 and save $5.
First 300 event attendees get a free goodie bag!

Your Tickets Includes:

• Tour 4 mid-century modern homes near White Rock Lake.
• 2 of the 5 are Ju-Nel Homes. They were designed by Lyle Rowley and/or Jack Wilson, understudies of modern architecture pioneer Howard Meyer who built Dallas' acclaimed Temple Emmanu-el. We broke the Ju-Nel story on the first tour in 2006, and subsequently in a D Home story.
  
• 1 of the 5 Homes is a "green" home designed by Alan Hoffmann, who D Magazine reported is a “green leader”.
  
• Architect meet-and-greets

Merriman Associates/Architects 2010 Grand Design Concept

Merriman Associates / Architects is located in downtown Dallas just across from the Akard Street DART station. Below is their newly released concept visualization of the Dallas Grand Hotel and surrounding Main Street Garden park. The Dallas Grand, formerly the Statler Hilton Hotel,was put on the 2008 list of "America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places" by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.



This video showing the rendering of the hotel lobby and rooms are a hopeful sign that Merriman & Associates are bidding for the job of restoring the once majestic hotel to it's former glory.

Interview with Santiago Calatrava: Designer of the new Margaret Hunt Bridge

Two decades ago, Tom Fisher, now dean of the University of Minnesota College of Design, visited Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava in Zurich, where he has a staff of 40 and a lakeside villa.
As he was ushered into the architect's office, Fisher noticed an odd artifact hanging above the desk: the skeleton of a dog. "I thought it was his long-lost pet," he says. Read the full interview at Fast Company.com

RE:Vision Dallas Winner: Entangled Bank

The winner of the RE:Vision Dallas competition has been named. The North Carolina firm Little has won with their Entangled Bank design.

From the UrbanRevision.Org website:
Something incredible is about to happen in downtown Dallas. Soon, a single block will be transformed into a place that creates economies, supports community, facilitates relationships and generates resources. The winners of Re:Vision Dallas have created plans that challenged us, engaged us, and inspired us. And their ideas, from local materials and vegetated screens to integrated greenways, will shape how people will live and work here in the future.


Entangled Bank is a complex yet simple network of elements. Each piece whether it is the bird, the plant, the worm or the soil personally contributes to the growth and ultimate survival of each. They are all very different from one another but each is very dependent on the other. For without them the bank would unravel and fail. Within the network still a very personal cycle of life persists that starts with conception, continues with growth and ultimately flourishes or sometimes fails. But the bank itself is meant to sustain and offer every opportunity for its constituents to succeed. This same notion can be related to the natural environment as well as the social landscape of Dallas and also our site.

 

What if we not only sought to teach and educate about the importance of living sustainably out of respect for the environment but we actually sustained and rehabilitated those among us who were struggling? What if we welcomed them back within the comfort of the entangled bank and as they grew and flourished we watched them begin to contribute to the bank themselves? It is our belief that true sustainability relates not only to the environment but also has key economic and social impacts.

 

Read more at the competition website.

Terrorist Plot on Fountain Place

Yesterday Dallas FBI agents intercepted a Jordanian terrorist in an attempt to detonate a car bomb to blow up the Fountain Place building. Fountain Place is a 1.2 million-square-foot office tower of green reflective glass rising 60 stories from a beautiful water garden located at the corner of Ross Avenue and Field Street in downtown Dallas. This is one of my favorite modern buildings in downtown Dallas. I see it everyday on my way to work and on the drive home.

Designed by I.M. Pei & Partners, the original plans were for the development of a second twin tower that was not built. It's location was just north adjacent to the existing tower. The second tower was also to include the famous plaza and water gardens with connections to the first tower. Although it was not built I can only imagine what the two towers would have looked like peering over the Dallas skyline.


The alleged terrorist mentioned during the planning stages of the attempted bombing that he wanted to blow up the tower because it reminded him of the World Trade Center in NYC. An eerie thought for sure. It makes me happy to know that the F.B.I. are diligent in their mission to seek out and uncover terror activity, and we can all see the value in their efforts especially on a day like yesterday.