 "Photo: Jordan Smothermon; The Daily Texan")
Fourteen UT architecture students will present their visions of Dallas to stakeholders, architects, urban planners and designers this spring while working with the Dallas Urban Laboratory, a long-term research project aimed at aiding the development of west Dallas.
As a part of “Forward Dallas” — the city’s initiative to transform Dallas into a more vibrant, successful city — Dean Almy, an associate architecture professor and director of the laboratory, is engaging his students by asking them to help redevelop the western bank of Dallas’ Trinity River.
Almy said the land that students are focusing on is partly industrial and has many vacated areas.
“The area has culturally strong but economically depressed neighborhoods,” Almy said. “We’re looking for something that will further this project and take into account those neighborhoods.”
The laboratory takes a new group of students every spring, and each semester students continue where the previous group left off.
“The first year the Dallas lab was in existence, we had a master plan and envisioned what would be on the west of the river corridor,” Almy said. “We took the city seriously and asked, ‘What would this really look like?’”
The laboratory’s initial plan aims to transform this area into a mix of housing, commercial, retail and recreational buildings, Almy said. He also said that while the city is securing a professional firm to lead the redevelopment, many of the students’ ideas and visions will be implemented.
“The ideas are taken very seriously because the designers realize we’re able to do work that they don’t necessarily have the time or budget to do,” said Chad Gnant, an architecture graduate student and the project’s research assistant.
West Dallas Investments LP owns part of the land with which the students are working.
“The students came up with some really great, fresh ideas that have no preconceived notion of what anything should look like,” said Butch McGregor, a managing partner of West Dallas Investments. “The mayor and most of the City Council members have looked at their proposals and embraced their ideas.”
The students proposed moving Beckley Avenue, the street immediately west of the river, farther away from the levee.
“That is something we have been discussing with the city, and we’re 99 percent sure it will eventually happen,” McGregor said. “We don’t know if it’ll be in the exact form they proposed it, but being able to see what we’re talking about has had a really tremendous effect.”
The students are also working with international firms leading the redevelopment.
“It’s not like a typical project that we present to professors,” said architecture senior Kai Pedersen. “We’ll get questioned from a developer’s mind-set. It’s a great experience.”
Since Almy opened the laboratory three years ago, more than 30 architecture students have worked on the project.
“I experienced a great deal of growth through basically looking at the city overall,” said Gnant, who took the class last spring. “Architecture can be focused on a piece of land, but the lab helped me envision the space between the buildings and streetscapes.”
Because city development takes decades, the laboratory is a long-term initiative.
“The lab really allows the city to look at different options, whether they agree with them or not,” Gnant said. “They are options that need to be presented. It can have a very good impact on how Dallas develops over the next 25 or 30 years.”
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